Are you planning to go into business with someone else?
Here are the Top 5 Things You Need to Know that a good lawyer can help you with:
1. Good communications and properly written agreements will help you avoid legal problems with your partners and the expense and hassle that go along with any kind of legal dispute. Because of the potential cost involved with legal disputes, even if they don’t end up in a lawsuit, paying a lawyer a reasonable fee now to help you to avoid expensive future problems makes good business sense.
2. Ideally, business partners should provide full disclosure of their respective financial situations to each other, on a confidential basis, before going into business together. This can help to avoid nasty surprises later on.
3. Shareholders who also work for the business should have clearly written and comprehensive shareholders’ agreements and employment agreements. Avoid sample agreements that you find on the Internet. They often are based on a quite different legal regime and may not include terms that your particular situation will require.
4. Before you become business partners, discuss what you expect from the business and from each other and make sure those expectations are included in your written agreements before you invest further time and/or money.
5. Discuss and include procedures for resolving disputes including how to deal with those annoying, but perhaps not so serious, issues that will likely come up when you’re running the business. Make sure that any procedures you choose make sense from both an economic and a personal perspective.
It’s not hard to get excited about the prospect of starting a new venture with your friends (or even family members) and to rush ahead to put it all into place without taking the necessary steps to protect your interests for the future. If you find yourself in a sticky situation because you haven’t got the written agreements you should have, Railtown Law can help. Contact us.