When you're a really tiny startup, you don't really have any legal needs that take a lawyer more than a couple of hours to do. When you're bigger, you still don't have a ton of work in terms of hours.

The startup I worked at had a quarter-million in legal fees one year. That was about as much as just one of our hired-gun contractors.

If it's your first business and you're strapped for cash you can often get free legal advice (in Austria that would be from the Wirtschaftskammer - the ministry of commerce).

Worth checking out which small-business programs your local government provide- a lot of them do, especially for "clean industries" like software.

I agree with this question. Specifically for bootstrapped start-ups. Will lawyers ever work for equity?

Most of the big Silicon Valley firms will defer fees until your first significant financing.