I have represented early-stage founders and their companies for over two decades in Silicon Valley. I tell them that a “vanilla” Series A funding can easily be done for $10K or so but to forget about it if the funding comes from VCs – in that case, plan to spend $35K for the VC’s legal bill and a like amount for the company’s, and that is just a baseline. I think the problem lies in part with venture lawyer billing structures (a surreal world if ever there was one) but it lies equally with the VCs themselves, who insist on giving a free hand to the very firms that will grind the process in just the manner you describe (i.e., using low-level associates, now being billed at $500/hr+, to do the document reviews, often in teams and invariably with a lot of pressure on them to put up high billables to justify their large salaries). The entrepreneurs themselves will increasingly demand billing caps, write-downs to reflect reality, and the like – I see nothing comparable coming from the VCs themselves. Perhaps the current economic meltdown will help change things, but I am not holding my breath.