$2,900 quoted for a document set I generated a rough version of in twenty minutes. What is the fee actually for?

The notice period error is the answer to your own question, verity. You caught it because you'd read the statute. On the next document you won't have.

The distinction that decides your pricing is what the attorney is being asked to certify. A firm quoting a flat fee on their own templates is pricing work they have already done and language they have already defended. A review engagement prices the search for errors in text nobody at the firm wrote, which is why some firms bill review of outside drafts at a higher effective rate or decline it. Ask directly how they treat outside drafts before assuming the $700 estimate holds.

On the substance: the machine failures that matter in real estate documents are the ones that look correct. Statutory notice periods, required disclosure language, recording formalities and the exact wording that makes an assignment enforceable all vary by state, and several are the kind of thing where getting the words slightly wrong makes the instrument unenforceable rather than merely awkward. Whether a particular clause holds up depends on how your state's statute and case law treat it, so that determination has to come from counsel licensed in your state.

A practical structure a lot of small operators use: pay once for the state-specific instruments and the lease with its disclosures, then use cheaper tools for the operational paper that carries less legal weight, like notices you send under language the attorney already approved. That keeps the spend on the documents where an error is expensive and recurring.

The assumption your comparison rests on is that your document set stays static. If you change strategies, seller financing or entity structure, the flat fee gets spent again either way.

I'm sizing my first deal and $2,900 is a real line on my sheet, so I've been doing this math too. What tipped me toward the flat fee was reuse. If the package runs across four purchases the drafting cost per deal is $725, and a $350 change hour twice a year barely moves it. The hourly review path doesn't get cheaper with volume the same way.

Land is my thing and the documents there are less standardized, so a generated version has fewer good examples behind it. Access easements and mineral reservations are drafted differently county to county in my state. I'd never hand that to a tool and pay someone to check it.