1. What experience does the legal team have dealing with clients in a comparable sector, company size, or stage as a small business owner?
Different sectors have distinct requirements. If you are representing a food-catering company, you will need to be aware of the numerous municipal and city permissions that are required. When promoting e-commerce enterprises, you must be conversant with cross-state online sales taxes. Due to transaction size and risk exposure, a major firm is more likely to need more lengthy business, investment, and employment contracts than a startup.
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2. What is a reasonable legal expenditure budget?
A quarterly, if not yearly, legal budget is recommended so that small company owners know how much money to put away.
3. What are the feasible deadlines for my company’s goals?
Timeline of legal initiatives to be undertaken, their priority, and the time required to complete them.
4. Does the firm have any proprietary assets? Is the company’s intellectual property appropriately protected?
This is critical for budgetary considerations when it comes to fees.
5. What experience does the legal team have dealing with clients in a comparable sector, company size, or stage as a small business owner?
Different sectors have distinct requirements. If you are representing a food-catering company, you will need to be aware of the numerous municipal and city permissions that are required. When promoting e-commerce enterprises, you must be conversant with cross-state online sales taxes. Due to transaction size and risk exposure, a major firm is more likely to need more lengthy business, investment, and employment contracts than a startup.
6. How can a small company owner effectively safeguard his or her personal money and assets from business risks?
Incorporate the company, regard it as a distinct organisation with separate bank accounts, and record critical business decisions made with your business partner (such as raising funds, taking out loans, and entering into big commercial contracts). Ordinarily, such papers are referred to as directors’ resolutions or minutes.
7. When you initially meet with a small company owner, what are they most perplexed about?
The kind of company to create – LLCs, C corporations, S corporations – and the state in which to incorporate.
8. How might excellent legal services aid in the growth of a small business?
A small firm may benefit from quality legal services in two ways. Internally, professional legal services may provide the groundwork for a small firm’s rapid growth and expansion, such as expediting the process of acquiring money, recruiting, granting incentive pay, and generating business contract templates. Externally, excellent legal services may be very beneficial to small firms in contract talks with Fortune 500 organisations, since some of those contracts can be quite complicated. An experienced attorney’s job will be to assist the client in obtaining favourable terms, to protect the client from taking on responsibilities that outweigh the benefits the client will receive, and to maintain a good relationship with the Fortune 500 company in the hopes of further engaging the client.
9. How can high-quality legal services assist small firms in saving money?
Quality legal services will advise small firms on what legal expenses are required and which are optional. For instance, I have a startup customer that wants to submit ten trademark registrations to protect their goods. As their lawyer, and understanding that they are a startup, my role is to investigate whether there is a way to submit fewer applications that cover the same scope, or at least the main products.
10. How can small firms get the most out of their legal team?
Provide proper background for a legal situation to your legal team. For example, when requesting your legal team to analyse a contract, it will be good to offer your legal team with a little of history on the relationship between the parties, how essential the project is to the small company, and how aggressive the legal team should be. It also assists the legal staff if the client is well-organized and asks specific questions!
11. Should all business partners own the same percentage of a company? If so, why or why not?
This should be OK as long as the equity split does not lead to a stalemate scenario. A 50/50 split, for example, is not a smart idea if there are just two company partners. However, if there are three company partners, a 33/33 split is acceptable since a stalemate scenario is not feasible.
12. What are the top three considerations for a small company owner when acquiring an established firm?
Assess the valuation accurately, check the company’s tax records to identify profitability, and determine why the business is for sale if there is any outstanding tax due.