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Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) are designed to protect your business’s intellectual property. When you operate a business, you likely have some sort of business secret that lets you separate yourself from your competitors. These can relate to your business’s operating process, your product, or just your brand. These can take the form of trade secrets, copyrights, patents, or trademarks.
NDAs are for when you need to share these business secrets but also need who you’re sharing them with to keep them secret. When someone signs an NDA, they agree to never reveal the business secret, or at least not speak of it until a certain time. But NDAs aren’t a one-size fits all solution. There are instances where someone cannot sign an NDA, so you either have to change your plans so you don’t need this person anymore or need another way to ensure their secrecy.
If you don’t know when someone cannot sign an NDA, the entrepreneurial and corporate law attorneys at Tressler & Associates can help.
Who Can’t Sign an NDA?
When it comes to types of people who can’t sign NDAs, that are a few groups who make up a large portion of the population:
Minors
People with compromised mental faculties
Intoxicated individuals
Someone who already knows the contents of the NDA
Minors
A minor is anyone under the age of 18 years old. They are not adults in the eyes of the law and do not have the capacity to understand and sign binding contracts.
While it’s not technically illegal for a minor to sign on a dotted line, no contract they sign is legal and is null and void. It cannot be used against them even after they eventually turn 18. This means that if a child gets a hold of or hears of your business’s secret through legal means, they can’t be made to keep it a secret.
A Person with Compromised Mental Faculties
Someone with compromised mental faculties would be considered someone who cannot make decisions for themselves. This can be due to mental disabilities, traumatic brain injury, or being in a coma. They cannot safely make decisions for themselves so they also cannot sign a contract. If they have a conservatorship, that person may be able to sign for them in certain situations.
Intoxicated Individuals
Anyone under the influence of alcohol or drugs cannot sign legally binding contracts. This means it is important to verify the mental condition of whoever you want to sign an NDA. If they can prove that they were under the influence when they signed the NDA, it can become null and void, while they still know your business’s secret(s).
Informed or Potentially Informed Persons
A person cannot be forced to sign an NDA for information they already know. This situation occurs when they have learned your business’s secrets:
Prior to being presented with the NDA
From a third party on a non-confidential basis
From reverse engineering a product or device
If you accidentally reveal important information to someone before they sign an NDA, any NDA they sign to keep that specific information secret is null and void. You can still have them sign NDAs for related information they don’t know yet.
For example, if they find out about a new product you have, you can have them sign an NDA about the contents or process of making the product. This way if they explain what they already knew, they’re likely to break the NDA for what they found out.
This same legal logic also applies to anything in the public domain. While someone may not know the specifics of what is in the public domain, they could have learned about it before they were asked to sign an NDA. They cannot sign an NDA to keep secret what they–or anyone–could know before they were shown the NDA.
Contact Tressler & Associates When Someone Can’t Sign Your NDA
Tressler & Associates can help you write airtight NDAs and other business documents. When someone can’t sign an NDA, there are other documents that can make them legally obligated to protect your business’s intellectual property. That’s just one of the solutions we can offer to help your business. For more information and a consultation, contact us today.
Starting a business is one of the hardest things you will ever do, and running a business is a close second. Every day will bring new challenges but also new possibilities to improve and further your business. Some possibilities bring risks that can seriously hurt your business, but also catapult it into the stratosphere. One of these possibilities is buying a business.
You can buy a business for many reasons. Another business may have a patent or technology you need or help you improve your revenue by opening you up to another industry. One of the more exciting possibilities is buying a competitor to take control of the market and allow you to do more of what you already do. There are many reasons to consider buying a business, but with any large business venture comes risk.
If you’re planning to buy a business but are unsure of what risks you may take on, consider contacting an entrepreneurial law attorney. We can look into the legal requirements and risks that go into buying a company, taking into account the new business’s size, your current business’s size, both associated industries, and what the state(s) requires for such a purchase. The attorneys at Tressler & Associates are ready to help.
What Are the Risks When Buying a Business?
Let’s divide potential business purchases into two categories: buying a business in the same or similar industry as your business and buying a business in a different industry. Some risks apply to both, but some risks are only associated with one type of business purchase and not the other. Some universal risks include:
Onboarding Employees: Odds are that any business you purchase will not have the same company culture as yours. This means the employees have different work processes and work ethics. You have to either reconcile these differences with your business’s working process or transition them completely to yours. If management is up to this challenge, this can cause both businesses to stall and suffer.
Onboarding Customers: Even if you buy another business, you still have to remind its customers that you’re here to serve/sell to them. Customers won’t automatically understand that your business is the only one that can help them without you showing it. You need to have marketing blasts, public transitions, and constant contact with your new customers. You also have to do so in a way that abides by corporate law, especially while the purchase is still going through.
Gathering Capital: You have to have the capital to purchase a business like you would anything else. In most cases, businesses would take out loans rather than spend a large amount of their business savings. Getting a loan leads to the risk of being in debt should the business venture go array. It can even be the reason the business venture doesn’t have the chance to work out because you can’t pay back the loans or other investments you collected.
Keeping Track of Taxes: While the types of taxes may change depending on what kind of business you’re purchasing, you will have to pay more and track more. When you have to start filing as one entity together, or as two separate entities, is something attorneys and financial analysts can guide you through as time goes on.
IP Ownership: Once you settle the transfer of trademarks, copyrights, and patents to your business, you still have to deal with branding issues. This extends beyond marketing but having to own the various different combinations of your brand with your new businesses. You also have two brands you have to protect. Even if you completely rebrand the business you’re buying to be like yours, you still have to make sure that no one infringes on your purchase’s intellectual property.
Risks of Buying a Business in Your Industry
While there may be fewer problems with onboarding employees and customers since you know what they sell, there are more problems surrounding the purchase itself. If you’ve been paying attention to the news, company mergers are popular right now, with names big and small gobbling each other up and disrupting their industries.
A small business buying up another small business isn’t going to be as big a deal as Disney buying 20th Century Fox, but it may affect your local community. Competition is key to our economy on every level. If there are three businesses in the neighborhood competing for the same audience and one buys another, then the third can do something about it.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has several laws and regulations about this. You can be investigated and need your purchase approved if your business is important enough to your local economy or someone else in the market has a problem with it. This means you have to contend with competitors and the government if you’re not careful about your purchase. To avoid these kinds of problems, extensive research needs to be done across multiple fields, especially entrepreneurial law.
Risks of Buying a Business Outside of Your Industry
While the government may be less inclined to keep you from entering a new industry, competitors may be more so. When you buy a business in another industry, you aren’t removing one of the competitors in that market unless you plan to shutter the business. This does mean that you’re giving your purchase a perceived advantage in the marketplace by giving them your investment. Competitors will see this as a threat and try to drive you out. Sellers may even decide not to work with you because you’re not a trusted veteran in the industry.
Not having connections, even as rivals, can make it difficult to be successful. No industry is welcoming to outsiders, and you may have many competitors and tangentially related companies who actively try to keep you out. This can lead to a purchase that has wasted your money.
The other issue is that when your business operates across multiple industries, there are more laws and regulations you have to follow. If you’re not familiar with everything you’re buying into, you need an attorney who can explain it. You will likely need legal professionals to review your decisions for years before you’re operating in perfect condition.
Consider the Risks with the Help of Tressler & Associates
We have several attorneys with experience helping businesses find success in their many different business ventures. Our attorneys review business documents, create them, and work with businesses to plan for the future as best we can. This way, your business is less likely to be slowed and threatened by a business risk you want to take. Buying another business is one prime example of how we can help.
For entrepreneurial attorneys who can help you through the process of buying another business, contact Tressler & Associates today.
Most people don’t have the cash they need to start a business, so they get funding from lenders. If a small business owner has good enough credit and a good business plan, they can get funding from a bank loan. However, the bank often denies a startup a loan because they do not have strong enough collateral. This often leads to startups seeking funding from angel round financing or crowd-sourced financing.
But are these good alternatives? Sometimes small business owners will attempt one of these types of financing to get collateral for a bank loan, but is that a good idea? Both have their strengths and weaknesses and will work better for some startups than others. The entrepreneurial attorney at Tressler & Associates, PLLC can help you figure out which type of financing is best for you and what legal documents you need to attempt either.
The Pros & Cons of Angel Round Financing
Angel round financing is when a single or small group of high-net-worth individuals want to invest in a company. These individuals are called angel investors and make a profitby investing in shares of companies. They can later sell off their shares of the business for a profit or continuously profit off their share for years.
The Pros
Angel financing can produce more money. Depending on the worth of the angel investor, they may prefer to invest enough into your business that you don’t need a bank loan. This way, they can have a bigger stake and more profit while you take on less risk depending on the investor.
Angel financing is not a loan. While there are exceptions, it is uncommon for angel investors to treat their investment like a loan. They can seek a contract that says a small business owner will pay it back, but usually, angel investors don’t expect money to be repaid. They typically treat it as a business venture or investment that will lead to more money. This doesn’t happen if their investment is treated like a loan with minor interest.
Angel investors take on the risk. Since there’s no loan and the investment doesn’t have to be paid back, the risk on the business owner is lessened incredibly. If the business goes under, there’s no collateral other than the business itself. There’s also no bank breathing down your neck, damaging your credit score. While a failed business will affect your resume and portfolio, that’s something many would prefer over owing a bank after a failed business.
Angel investors are usually also business owners. Angel investors naturally want your business to succeed and are typically more than happy to provide advice, connections, and resources to help your business become successful. In many ways, an angel investor can be like a business partner.
Cons
Risk of more pressure while the business is operating. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to a bank if you succeed or fail as long as you make your payments. They’re not going to pressure you to do well or change your business philosophy. An angel investor will, as they want you to succeed so they can get a profit. While having a business partner can be helpful, it can also be a pain if you have different business philosophies.
Angel investors have a controlling stake in your business. Where a bank cannot tell you how to run your business, an angel investor with shares in your company can. If you disagree and come into conflict on how to proceed, your business can stall.
The Pros & Cons of Crowd-Sourced Financing
Crowd-sourced financing is any funding you can get from donations from the general public. While going out and asking people for money isn’t feasible, online sites like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, IndieGoGo, and Patreon have made it easy for people to donate money. You can advertise your crowdfunding campaign on a budget and these sites will push them to help you find success. It’s not common for small businesses to fund their entire startup on crowd-sourced financing, but it’s how many have attracted investors or gained collateral for a bank loan.
Pros
You can choose whether your funding is equity-based. To be equity-based means that anyone who invests is investing for a portion of your business’s shares. Not all crowd-sourced financing options allow for this, but you can use one that does to reward investors for funding your business. At the same time, you can choose not to, so you don’t owe anyone anything but an attempt at starting your business.
Creates proof that there is a market for your business. When you start a business, it’s to offer a service or product. Investors are investing in the idea that people want to use that service or product. When you can’t presale a product before production, crowd-sourced financing can prove consumer interest. It’s hard to argue that there’s no market for your business when people are paying you without even getting the service or product.
You can use crowd-sourced financing at any time. You don’t have to attend conventions or make appointments with investors. With crowd-sourced financing, you decide when to ask for funding. This is useful when you need to attract investors, purchase collateral, or cover the surprise costs of starting a business. It’s a lot faster to start a Kickstarter campaign than it is to find an investor.
Cons
Fundraising is often limiting. Angel investors are usually incredibly well-off, enough so that if your business fails, they’ll make it out just fine. With crowd-sourced financing, you’re relying on the general public. There’s no guarantee that they’ll have the money you’re looking for or offer it to you. Crowd-sourced financing also rarely provides enough money to start a business. Its strength lies in covering costs or helping startups afford collateral for a bank loan.
Which is Best for Your Startup?
When it comes to angel round financing vs. crowd-sourced financing, it depends on how you feel about potentially taking on business partners. It’s unlikely that angel investors will just leave you to your own devices. If you feel your business can only succeed under your vision, you can’t do angel round financing, but if you welcome help, angel investors are the way to go.
If you wish to pursue crowd-sourced financing, your best option is to use it to collect collateral or prove to a bank that your business is a safe investment for a loan. Then you can run your business without outside interference as long as you pay back loan payments.
Why Do You Need an Attorney for Angel Round Financing & Crowd-Sourced Financing?
Whether you partner with angel investors or take out a loan, you need legal documentation protecting your rights to your business and the money you take. Failing to obtain documentation can use serious problems in the future, and potentially cause you to lose your business.
Even with crowd-sourced financing, you need to establish control, and how much power your supporters do or don’t have. For specifics on what documentation you need, how to create them, and how to file them, you need an experienced entrepreneurial attorney.
Contact Tressler & Associates, PLLC for Help
Starting a new business is something you have to take seriously. Once you know what kind of business you want to start, financing is the most important thing. Without money, you can’t start a business, but money can come with unwanted consequences.
Contact the entrepreneurial law attorney at Tressler & Associates, PLLC for help. We’ll help you make sure that your financing and your control over your business are protected.
Loans and payouts aren’t only for incredibly wealthy and successful multi-billion dollar businesses. For small businesses, there is what is called a Small Business Administration loan, or an SBA loan for short. These loans are designed to support small businesses as they start and/or grow in profit and manpower.
What is the SBA?
The SBA, a U.S. agency that guarantees and oversees loans to small businesses, is designed to counsel and assist small business owners with growing their own businesses. They have tools and educational resources available, some for free and some not. These tools and resources include:
Loans: The agency itself doesn’t loan small businesses money but connects them to sources that do and oversee the loan process. These loans are issued by banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions that partner with the SBA.
Entrepreneurial Development: These counseling and training programs are provided by the SBA for a low cost. There’s no experience level required to take them, and they also have mentor programs that can connect new business owners to retired and existing entrepreneurs. There are over 1,800 locations that offer these services across the country.
Contracting: The SBA handles 23% of the U.S. government’s contracting dollars. They only give these contract dollars to small businesses that can provide a service or product for federal departments and agencies. 5% of the 23% is reserved for women-led businesses, 3% for disabled and veteran-led businesses, and the remaining 15% can go to anyone.
Advocacy: The SBA also works as an advocate for small businesses in the nation by reviewing legislation and pushing laws that serve the interests of small business owners.
What is an SBA Loan?
As mentioned, the SBA connects small businesses to loan providers and guarantees your loan. They only partner with verified loan providers that can be trusted to work with small businesses to succeed. The only time the SBA will loan out money themselves is to provide disaster relief.
Having a backed or guaranteed loan means that if the recipient defaults on it or can’t pay it on time, a third party will assume the debt. This means if a small business takes on an SBA loan and defaults on it, the SBA will have your back and take responsibility for the loan.
What Are the Types of SBA Loans?
Like any loan, there are multiple types that serve different purposes. Sometimes a business needs more money than others, and for different reasons. Because of this, the loans have different repayment schedules and different qualifications for loan approval. These SBA loan types include:
504 Loan: Also known as a Grow loan, this provides up to $5 million to a small business to buy assets the business needs to operate. This can include real estate property.
7(a) Loan: This is the SBA’s primary loan program. The maximum loan amount is $5 million and is commonly used for starting businesses.
Disaster Loans: These provide relief in the event of an uncontrollable disaster. This can include natural events like a storm, hurricane, and earthquake, or emergencies such as robberies, riots, and product recalls.
Having the backing of the SBA makes your business far more likely to receive a loan. The agency also allows businesses to make lower payments for a longer time period than loans without the backing of the SBA.
What Do You Need an Attorney For?
A common misconception about SBA loans is that if you fail to pay them, the SBA will cover them for you. You still have to pay the SBA instead, they’re just easier to handle and will charge your business less than another loan lender, but you still have to pay. What you should do in this situation is modify your repayment plan, and to do that with the loan lender or the SBA, you need an attorney.
To change your payment plan, or keep shady loan collectors off your back, contact the corporate law attorney at Tressler & Associates for help.
There’s never just one of anything. In contract law, this is especially true, and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are the perfect example of this. NDAs are contracts used by individuals and businesses to share private information safely. They legally bind individuals to share information with promises of confidentiality, save for a few exceptions. These can be shared with new and current employees, business partners, clients, and more. Anyone who might need to know a trade secret, a patent, or some other invention, should sign an NDA. But there are many types of NDAs, so you have to know which one is right for you.
The Three Tiers of NDAs
The different types of NDAs are broken down into tiers. At the top, there are three types, unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral NDAs. The rest of the specific NDA types fall under these three categories. Most are based on who has to sign the NDA. Not all NDAs are created equally, and they can only demand so much secrecy from strangers when compared to their employees.
Unilateral NDAs
To be a unilateral NDA, the NDA has to be one-way. This means that the business or individual is asking you to keep a secret, but isn’t keeping anything secret for you. Sometimes this happens because there is nothing that one side needs the other to keep private during their business arrangements. Sometimes it can also be because a business wants to release or use information from a case study and the NDA has to be one way to use information from it.
Employer-employee NDAs
It’s incredibly common for businesses to require employees to sign NDAs before they can start work. It’s common for businesses to have the intellectual property (IP) that they need to operate their business that also they don’t want their competitors to have. IP that would necessitate an employer-employee NDA contains:
Trade secrets
Patents
Business and development plans
Pricing data
Supply sources
Operation plans
Merchandising systems
Technical information such as projections and inventions
Stockholder information
Company-contractor NDAs
If you need to hire temporary contractors for a short-term project or to temporarily fill a spot, you’ll need an NDA. You can’t use the same unilateral NDA for employees as contractors because contractors aren’t your employees. They can be working with other companies while working with you. These other companies may be your competitors, or related to your competitors, so you need to have legal contracts designed for their situation.
Inventor-evaluator NDAs
When someone invents a patent or a prototype, they need NDAs to keep people from stealing their ideas.
Business Information: This includes the inventor’s financials, information on any vendors they use, the cost to develop the prototype, the cost to reproduce the prototype, and anything about the methods of conducting.
Customer Information: The names and contact information of any of the inventor’s customers.
Intellectual Property: This pertains to all parts of a prototype, including test data, test results, tools and services used in production, patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and unreleased marketing materials.
Service Information: All data relating to the inventor’s products and services that don’t count as IP.
Accounting Information: This includes balance sheets, company liability information, insurance coverage, expense reporting, profit, and loss reporting.
Seller-buyer NDAs
When you are selling a product directly to a buyer, you want to make sure that the buyer doesn’t reverse-engineer your product or give any important details to a competitor. A seller-buyer NDA will protect you by limiting one’s ability to share information on:
Business operations: This is the seller’s financial and internal information.
Intellectual property: IP in this instance is information relating to the seller’s research and development, and anything else having to do with their proprietary rights.
Production process: This includes all the processes used in the creation, manufacturing, and production of the seller’s process and services.
Computer technology: This includes all the technical and scientific information about any process or machine used by the seller.
Bilateral NDAs
These are also known as mutual or two-way NDAs, where both parties require the other to maintain a level of confidentiality. This is common in ongoing partnerships, specifically of the manufacturing kind. If a business needs a manufacturer to make their products and the manufacturer has a production process they want to keep private, a bilateral NDA is perfect for them. They’re also perfect for corporate takeovers, joint ventures, mergers, and acquisitions.
Multilateral NDAs
NDAs of this type include more than two parties. It doesn’t matter if it’s one, two, or all of the parties sharing confidential information, once there are more than two, it becomes a multilateral NDA. Many of the NDA types under unilateral agreements can be multilateral as long as only one party is sharing confidential information. If not, then these NDAs will most resemble bilateral NDAs where there are mutual promises and agreements to secrecy.
Contact Us for Help With All Types of NDAs
Our corporate law attorney has the experience needed to write any of your NDAs. Whether they’re with employees, buyers, sellers, or partners, we have the experience to make what you need. If you need someone to review an NDA that’s been given to your business or employees, we can review it to ensure you can realistically follow it. Contact our team today.
In the United States, the nuclear family made of only married parents and children is not as common as you would think. The term was popularized back in the 1920s, and at its peak in the 1970s, nuclear families only made up 40% of American households. Nowadays, the number is down to 18% and falling. In fact, blended families, where at least one partner has a child from a previous relationship, are far more common today. The U.S. Bureau of Census estimates that 40% of families in the U.S. are blended.
But when both partners have children from previous relationships, and then have children of their own, how does estate planning work in this instance? The documents are more or less the same, but what provisions should you consider that you wouldn’t in a nuclear family? With children from so many different types of families, making sure that they are all provided for by all of their parents is of the utmost importance.
If you’re unsure about how to proceed with your will or trust, contact the estate planning attorney at Tressler & Associates for help.
Estate Planning for Blended Families
Even if only one partner has children from a previous marriage, there are still issues that need to be addressed when making your will or a trust. In blended families, parents need to establish in their estate documents how they should spread their estate between the children depending on which parent passes away first. Then there’s the matter of handling arrangements from previous divorces. And while it may seem like a sore subject, there’s no guarantee that all relationships don’t ever sour. It’s important to make sure that the surviving spouse can’t hurt the inheritance of their stepchildren in any way.
Determining Inheritance
There are a few solutions to solving these problems within a will. When you and your spouse create your wills, you can list and specifically divide non-marital assets for your children and stepchildren. An experienced estate planning attorney can walk you through how to do this. The idea is to make sure that each child has something left to them that the other spouse or another child can’t claim.
Non-marital assets are property that a spouse owns before they were married. In most cases, anything one spouse purchases is a marital property they co-own with their spouse. The only exceptions are businesses, certain inherited properties, and anything that’s also co-owned with a third party outside the marriage.
This solution doesn’t solve every problem. If one spouse still has responsibilities from a previous divorce, such as alimony or an agreed-upon payment plan, a third party can claim their property or wealth post-death. This solution also can’t pass marital property from a parent to their child if the stepparent is the surviving spouse. There are other solutions for that.
Creating Specialized Trusts
Trusts are different from wills in that they contain the rights to a property. When you put something in a trust, it stops being your marital property, and the property of the trust’s recipient instead. If there’s something you want to pass down to one or more of your children, you would put them into a trust.
You can’t place all types of property into a trust, such as insurance, vehicles, and retirement funds. For these, you would need to use a different method through those providers, but the process isn’t entirely different from establishing a trust.
With a trust, you can also set specific standards and instructions for inheritance. If you only want to pass a certain amount of assets to your children under specific circumstances, such as if they were unmarried or unwell, you can. If your spouse passes away before you, you may want to leave your stepchildren an inheritance if what they receive from your spouse isn’t enough.
Avoid These Common Mistakes When Estate Planning for Blended Families
There are several mistakes that, if not rectified or avoided, can ruin all the work you’ve done with your wills and trusts. A quality attorney will suggest that you make sure you haven’t made a mistake in the following ways.
Not Settling Previous Marriages
Things like child support and alimony don’t always end early once you remarry. Remarriage only ends alimony if the spouse receiving alimony gets remarried. If the spouse paying alimony is remarried, they still have to continue their payments.
Child support also doesn’t end when a parent gets remarried. Child support only ends early if the parent paying child support terminates their parental rights. Make sure to settle alimony and child support payments or protect your children’s inheritance with trusts so a previous partner cannot claim payment from your estate.
Avoiding Pre-nuptial and Post-nuptial Agreements
Prenups, and their post-marriage counterparts, postnups, get an unearned reputation. While they can be seen as a sign of mistrust, if offered respectfully, they should be a sign of trust from one spouse to the other. If you and/or your spouse require specific estate assets to go to your or their children or that all children be treated equally in their inheritance, these agreements can establish that from the beginning.
Not Updating Old Wills
Old wills are not invalid until you make them so. Getting remarried doesn’t invalidate your old will, and making a new one doesn’t automatically invalidate them either. While a new will technically supersedes an old one, there are many instances where a potential beneficiary can argue for an inheritance or an improved inheritance based on an old will. Update or destroy your old will to be safe.
Contact Tressler & Associates for Help with Estate Planning for Your Blended Family
Families are complicated, and parents deserve all the help they can get for their children, blended families even more so. If you’re unsure how to handle your estate and make sure it provides for all of your children, contact the estate planning attorney at Tressler & Associates. We have the experience to make sure you have everything you need and are prepared for every outcome.
Commercial real estate property can seem simple from the outset. It’s a piece of property you use to run a business, as opposed to the residential property you live on. But then how does an apartment building work? Isn’t that residential real estate since people are living there, or is it commercial real estate since it’s owned by and makes a profit for someone who is not living on it? Can a real estate property be considered both at the same time?
When it comes to real estate law, it’s important to know and understand the distinctions between commercial and residential real estate properties. The laws that govern them are different, and when you have properties that have to deal with both types, you need a real estate attorney who can handle them both.
What Are the Criteria to Be a Commercial Real Estate Property?
Real estate property is classified as commercial or residential based on how the owner uses it, with a few exceptions. This means that a group of apartments or an apartment building is considered a commercial property.
If one building or property has two physical establishments, it can be considered a commercial and residential property at certain times. Think of a business with an apartment above it or a house with a family business operating on the same plot of land. This can be a commercial and residential real estate property, which leads to some complicated real estate laws, regulations, and taxes to deal with.
If there is only one place of residence being used for the business, such as a singular home that’s rented out, the property is residential. Using a residential space to temporarily make a profit does not change it into a commercial property until it can support more than one family.
What Are All the Commercial Real Estate Property Types?
There are four types of commercial real estate properties that all businesses typically fall under. These labels take the work performed in these locations into consideration and what services and utilities the space provides. These four types are:
Office space: These have basic utilities such as electricity, water, internet access, and food storage. They are the closest to residential spaces, in terms of what they provide. The main difference is that office spaces do not typically have bathing utilities and should not be used as living spaces.
Industrial-use: Locations that hold and maintain a line of production, through machines or labor, are industrial-use properties. This is where products are created, assembled, or where their parts are created. Farmland is considered an industrial-use real estate property.
Multi-family rental: These are commercial locations that offer multiple residences as a service. Once a residential real estate location has multiple units and can support multiple families, it cannot be considered a residential property. A large house that can support multiple families is not the same as a multi-family building designed to be for multiple families.
Retail: These are locations that sell products directly to consumers. The products can range from food, to clothes, to non-essential items and everything in between. As long as they accept some form of compensation and are open to the general public, they would be considered retail. If they are only open for appointments and/or specific individual consumers, the location will be considered an office space property, not a retail property.
These distinctions are important because they have different laws and tax laws to abide by. While they are all commercial real estate properties, they do not have all the same restrictions.
What Are All the Commercial Property Classifications?
Commercial real estate properties also have classifications. A property has to meet certain levels of classification, or it may not be used for certain business purposes. These classifications are based on the age, infrastructure, and location of the commercial property. Some industries, zoning locations, and licensing authorities have more extensive classifications, but most use the three-class model.
Class A: These are the highest quality buildings. These can be old or young, but either way, they’ve been properly maintained so that they have not fallen in quality. The physical infrastructure of these buildings is sound and will stand the test of time and natural disasters that are common in the location.
Class B: These buildings are typically older, but are of quality. They are safe to work in for most or all business purposes. They may need to be updated to meet the needs of certain commercial ventures. These buildings can be restored and potentially improved to meet Class A standards.
Class C: These buildings are the oldest, located in low-income areas where many properties are Class B or C. To make these buildings safe and capable of serving as commercial real estate properties for most or all types of businesses, they need maintenance and renovations.
Need Legal Help for Your Commercial Property?
The real estate law attorneys at Tressler & Associates have been helping local business owners for many years with their contracts, leases, zoning laws, and more. There are a lot of legal barriers that business owners need to be aware of and ready to deal with. Having an experienced legal attorney will help you avoid roadblocks to your business’s success. For helpful consultation, please contact our law firm today.
You have the right to copyright your work if your business produces content of any kind. That’s not hyperbole, if you’ve created music for your store, videos for your business’s social media, or the art for marketing flyers, you have copyrighted content. This content helps to cultivate an audience and define your brand. Whether it’s just to endear yourself in your local neighborhood or attract thousands of people to your online business, this content will become recognizable with your business. When something is tied so heavily to your business’s success and reputation, you can’t afford to not know the laws that protect it, and that includes copyright law. The intellectual property protection attorneys at Tressler & Associates can help.
What Are Copyrights?
You have to protect your content, and copyright laws do that. Copyrights are proof of ownership, but they come in many different forms. If you don’t maintain them and watch over them, they can come back to hurt you. A thing to remember about copyrighted content is that people can steal and abuse your work if you let them.
The Risks of Ignoring Copyright Law
While the U.S. Department of Justice will enforce copyright infringement when presented to them, they do not track and investigate infringement cases of their own. It is up to you as the copyright holder to identify and report instances of copyright infringement. If you do not, and you let them do so for extended periods of time, you will hurt your ability to enforce them.
You can never lose your copyright before it expires, but the longer you go without enforcing it, especially if you know it was being infringed upon, the lower the punishment. If someone has been using clips of your marketing videos to use for themself, like a competitor comparing your businesses, you will receive less in damages if you fail to file a complaint after discovering this infringement.
This means that even though they have caused you more damage by using your material over a longer period of time, you will likely receive less in damages for waiting so long to file the initial complaint.
How Can You Protect Your Copyrights?
From the second this content is created, you own the copyright, and from the moment you publish it, you have proof that you own it. It’s not definitive proof, but strong proof. That’s the first layer of protection your copyrighted content has.
The best protection you can get is from filing your copyrighted work with the U.S. Copyright Office. This is the strongest proof of ownership you can have. But if you produce a lot of content, it’s not cost or time-efficient to file copyrights for all of them. You want to file copyrights for content you will use repeatedly, such as any non-logo graphics. Logos tend to fall under trademarks, which have similar but different laws.
How Can Copyright Infringement Hurt My Business?
When it comes to marketing content, it can be repurposed by your competitors and those who don’t like your company to damage your brand and reputation. There are limits as to what can be considered copyright infringement, as your competitors and individuals are allowed to criticize you. It’s your assets that they can’t necessarily use.
If competitors and individuals are allowed to do this without restraint, they can slowly degrade your brand and destroy your reputation. Public reviews are incredibly important to a business’s success, so you want to be careful about how others influence them. While this may not make or break bigger businesses, it will significantly damage their profit margins. This can also seriously threaten the survival of a small business on the rise.
What Laws Affect Your Copyright?
There have been many copyright laws in the United States that explain how copyrights work, how long they last, and what is considered infringement.
Copyright Act of 1909
This copyright law set the groundwork for what laws would need to cover, but it wouldn’t last forever, and many of its ideas would change. Federal copyrights have secured the date it was published or once it was registered. This left little protection for works that were in the middle of production.
A copyright would last 28 years, believing that 28 years is enough time for content to either become irrelevant or be replaced. Afterward, it would join the public domain and be free for anyone to use. The copyright could be renewed in the 28th year and be extended.
Copyright Act of 1976
This is the copyright law that we go by today. For copyrights made after the law was enacted, the copyright lasts 70 years after the author’s death. To make the copyright last longer, file your copyright with an author, not as a business. If there’s no author, it will last 95 years after publication, or 120 years from creation, whichever comes first. Forgoing a tragedy, in most cases, copyrights based around an author last longer. You can maintain ownership while having an author. This may seem like more than long enough for you, but successful businesses last longer than their copyrights.
Contact the Intellectual Property Protection Attorneys at Tressler & Associates
Intellectual property (IP) goes beyond only copyrights for your content materials but includes your trade secrets, patents, and trademarks. An infringement on one of these aspects of your business can lead to serious legal action and fees. If the wrong IP is infringed upon, your business could be in serious trouble. Contact our entrepreneurial and corporate law attorneys for help. We’ll make sure your company’s IP assets are yours alone.
The great city of Nashville has recently shown an increase in population which is a sign of a growing economy. With new buildings continuously covering the city, Nashville has become a top destination of attraction and business. These are positive signs that the economy is thriving in the real estate world, which leads to a demand in both commercial and residential properties.
In order to take advantage of the real estate market, which has been on the rise for many years now, it is important to obtain the services of a real estate attorney so that you can legally protect yourself. Consulting with a real estate attorney provides many benefits to a successful transition. An attorney is able to create or evaluate an existing lease for the property that you currently own, or wish to own in the future. There can be many liabilities that are not known while being the owner of a property. In order to feel confident when you are going through a lease agreement, it is necessary to seek the guidance of a professional who can get the facts and provide the proper services.
There are a few policies that can protect you from any issues that may arise during the process of buying or selling a property. The first is for the owner to obtain owner’s title insurance. This is necessary so an owner will be protected from any issues concerning the title of the property that may arise, and you will not have to solve those issues alone or out-of-pocket. The next is for a lender to also have title insurance. If the owner or lender has a title insurance policy, that is not enough to be protected. Both the owner and the lender must acquire title insurance so that you can be properly covered and not have to worry about any of the issues because you will be protected.
Our attorneys make this a peaceful process and assure that your interests will be protected. Let us take the stress off of you and eliminate any possible risks of liability. Have a professional help take you through the proper steps to be safe in your purchase or sale of property.
