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When you are involved in a deal, whether it is a large strategic transaction, or a possible merger, acquisition, stock sale, or going public, you will start hearing the words “due diligence” thrown around. A lay person may not be familiar with this term, and it may not make sense. If you are like most business owners, you don’t play in the merger and acquisitions space, and you don’t read legal periodicals. You probably do not talk to lawyers every day.… Read the rest

Do not wait too long for advice. While meeting with a group of experienced consultants recently, we discussed mergers, what had worked, and what had not. We talked about clients from the nonlegal side, who wait too long to get advice on their mergers. They start doing things, preparing paperwork, discussing terms, and only later involve a team and lawyers. This is usually a big mistake.

Many business owners will say, “I don’t want to get lawyers involved, or I don’t want to get consultants involved because they will muck up the works; they will slow things down, and the deal will never get done.”

On the flipside, having trusted advice, having people you turn to, and building a team, can help you make sure that you make the right decisions and that you are not giving up terms.… Read the rest

Do you need the services of a law firm, or have you ever considered using LegalZoom, the popular internet software for filling out online forms and documents? Or perhaps one of its competitors? Here are a few things to consider. LegalZoom documents state that you should use that service in conjunction with a lawyer because you should have your own counsel.

Why do they say this? Because their forms are complex. In our law firm’s experience, we have seen many people start to use LegalZoom forms and either fill them out incorrectly or get confused.… Read the rest

There may come a time in your company’s business when you must decide if you need to consult a lawyer. Here are some factors that can help you determine whether this is indeed necessary or not.

#1.  What is the amount at stake? If you are looking at low dollars, it is probably not cost beneficial to involve a lawyer. You probably can afford to take the financial risk of any losses.

#2.  What is the risk? What is your liability exposure?… Read the rest

As your business grows, you are going to have challenges. Our friends at Strategic Coach would call this the “ceiling of complexity.” At some point, your business will get so complicated that you will not be able to manage it effectively. You cannot figure out how to make the business work better, and it will not grow without new thought or fresh ways of thinking about it.

How do you get new ideas into your business? How do you bring outside perspective?… Read the rest

They’re out there everywhere. There’s form of contracts for this and form of contracts for that. In our prior blogs, we’ve warned about some of the risks of using forms for your business, but what about when a form’s presented to you by a vendor or by a customer? Do you just take it and sign it? The answer should generally be no. There’s a lot of things that could be wrong in a form contract. Many times we found that the form contracts have been re-utilized or copied and pasted.… Read the rest

In the business world, NDAs or non-disclosure agreements are very common. It’s very typical for people early in the transaction to pass NDAs or non-disclosure agreements around and ask each other to sign them. Many people don’t think much about signing them. They just say oh, it’s an NDA. Sign it, but you need to be very careful about what that NDA does.

These are contracts between people and they should typically be legally enforceable. You want to be careful about what you’re agreeing to in a legally enforceable document.… Read the rest