What's the difference in cost between learning to discriminate between good lawyers and bad lawyers, and learning to avoid egregious legal errors on your own?
Having watched the back on forth on many contract reviews, "just DIY the contract review" is perilously bad advice. Thankfully, nobody gave it. You can DIY your company formation; the biggest risk you run is that you'll botch equity structure, but a lot of people don't care about that issue right away.
IP and liability type stuff is another one I'd probably DIY, at least early on. I have a small sample size (and have never hired a lawyer for that purpose myself), but everyone I know who's hired an lawyer for early-stage consulting on IP or liability risks more or less paid money to hear back, "everything you're doing is probably illegal, oh and you should plaster disclaimers everywhere".
Part might be a product/purchaser mismatch. I think what most people want on such issues is not purely legal advice, but integrated legal/business/technical advice, where someone who might primarily be a lawyer, but is also knowledgeable in the other areas, gives you balanced advice on how to mitigate your legal risks, within the technical and business constraints you also face. But people with such knowledge are fairly rare (and expensive), so it's more common to get very conservative legal advice that just points out that your product or service is a legal minefield (as most are).
