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Starting a new business is exciting. It’s taking your life path and swerving off to make a new one for yourself. It’s not easy, either. To begin a new startup, you need funding, employees, a business plan, and a product or service. That’s just what a business needs to operate. When you consider the important business documents you need to start your business, there’s so much more.
You’re the entrepreneur, you know how to get everything you need to operate, but business documents are plentiful and complicated. Even if you have started a business before, one document of the same type rarely looks the same from industry to industry. To make sure that these documents are legal, cover their bases, and protect your business in the context of your state, consider having an entrepreneurial attorney draft or review them for you. It’s our job to understand and recognize the minute details of these documents.
What Important Business Documents Do All Startups Need?
The business documents that startup owners need to complete prove their ownership, establish control over their business, confirm funding, and inform the government what taxes the business should be paying. These are documents that they need to always have on file, and several have to be filed with the government.
#1. Founder and Partnership Agreements
Founders’ and partnership agreements are needed if your startup is being founded by multiple people. This can include original and primary investors, co-owners of the company’s original patent or copyright, and anyone else who is helping to build the foundation of the company.
Even if you are the only founder, you still would want this document because it establishes your leadership and responsibilities. While you can skip this agreement, you leave yourself open to potential lawsuits that this defends against.
#2. Intellectual Property Protection
While not all new businesses build themselves off an original intellectual property (IP) like a patent or trade secret, the ones that do need to protect that IP. If an original IP allows your startup to stand out from the competition, another business legally getting a hold of it would be devastating.
Intellectual property protections come in various forms. Trademarks and copyrights are the most common forms of IP protection, and you want to file them with the government as soon as possible so other companies can’t legally use your IP.
#3. Operating Agreements
Every business needs short-term and long-term goals. This agreement provides strategies and procedures while establishing the business’s goals. While this binds you to work towards these goals, it binds fellow founders and execs as well. A business can’t succeed if it’s run by people with different motives and ideas about success.
To create an operating agreement, you need to decide what types of business you’re going to file under. There are three types of businesses you can file as, and you need to establish which type to make a legal operating agreement, and for your taxes.
If you eventually find that an operating agreement’s short-term and long-term goals do not benefit your business, you can update or change them with an attorney’s help.
#4. Joint Venture Agreements
If your startup has a group of founders rather than just one, your startup might be considered a joint venture. A joint venture is whenever multiple parties or businesses come together for a business venture, and a new startup counts as one.
Having a few individuals doesn’t necessarily count as a joint venture. Talk to an attorney to see if your business qualifies. If your business does, then you need a joint venture agreement. This important business document will establish the needs and responsibilities each of you has to fulfill.
#5. Loan Promissory Notes
Unless you have the money to support a business yourself or capital from another investing business, you’ll need a loan to start your business. Loans can be to set up a place of business, order or create products, pay workers, and market your business.
It’s best to get these loans from banks, but before you can sign one, you need to create or receive a promissory note. These are legally binding contracts and you should have an attorney review them so you understand the consequences of a missed payment. It’s always risky when you’re starting a new business, but this way is especially. You’re the one taking on all the risk of your startup if it fails. Give yourself every edge and protection you can.
Contact the Entrepreneurial Attorney at Tressler & Associates
No contract is simple. They all have complicated legal jargon that can be confusing. Don’t let yourself get tricked into a bad contract that hurts your partnership, ownership, or ability to provide for yourself.
The entrepreneurial attorney at Tressler & Associates is available to create and review any of these business documents for you. Contact us today.
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.
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.
We want to thank everyone who came out to celebrate with us for our 5 year Anniversary bash! We also want to thank each and every one of you who have supported us along the way, worked with us and been a part of our success. We look forward to serving you for many more years to come. We had a great evening surrounded by friends, family and business partners. We were honored to hear from Jodi McCullah of SAFE (Soldiers And Families Embraced), JT Cooper and Opal Justice for sharing their message with us and the stories of those servicemen who fought for our nation. We were entertained by Charles “Wigg” Walker and the Wigg Band. We had fun at the photo booth provided by Out of the Box and refreshments from Acme Feed & Seed. It was a fun evening of conversation, celebration and a lawyer or two showing off some dance moves.
Our theme for the evening was “Thankfulness” and we enjoyed reading the notes you left on our wall. We were inspired to read all that you were appreciative of this past year. It was great to hear such positive messages and to focus on our many blessings. It is easy to get caught up in the small stresses of our busy lives and it is always a positive thing to step back and realize all we have to be thankful for.
We have a lot of things coming up in the New Year. We just released our new website and our blog. Keep any eye on this as we hope to bring you all a wealth of helpful information that we hope will be truly useful to you. We are also in process of building out our second location in Mt. Juliet and hope to announce its official opening early in 2015. We have great aspirations for next year and once again thank you for your continued support; we couldn’t do it without you!
Here are a few photos from the night. To see the full gallery of pictures Click Here.
I recently spent some time in Florida. Amidst the beautiful, blue skies, I also learned about a lot of Florida laws. Although I am not licensed in Florida and I cannot give legal advice on Florida law, I can say that I was amazed that the differences between Tennessee and Florida. Being from the Sunshine State, I travel frequently between Nashville and Florida. Until this trip, I had never thought about how I am stepping into an entirely different set of laws by which I must abide when my plane crosses the Tennessee border. However, the truth is, no two states are alike in their laws. Don’t misunderstand me, of course there are many similarities, but state laws also vary greatly.
So, were you born in Tennessee or did you move here during your adult life? For many Tennesseans, especially those in Nashville and surrounding areas, the answer would be the latter option. Middle Tennessee has experienced incredible growth during the past couple of decades. Considering that growth, I ask those who fall in that second category, have you had all of your legal documents reviewed since moving to Tennessee?
It is for this reason that it is important to have any legal documents re-evaluated when you move. Maybe all of your documents will be in line with Tennessee law, but if they are not, you need to know. Bring in those old Wills, Trusts, business documents, or whatever else might be hiding in your filing cabinet, and we will gladly take a look. We would love the opportunity to then advise you on what steps are necessary, if any, to bring those documents in line with Tennessee law.
To learn more about how we can assist you in Contract Law or if you have any questions about this or any other legal matters Call Us 615.444.2345 or Contact Us Here
Technology and the internet have streamlined so many “official” processes that used to require hardcopy forms, the antiquated postage stamp, and worst of all- actual trips to and long waits inside government buildings. This is true for the creation of a limited liability company (“LLC”) in Tennessee. Thanks to an intuitive and easily navigable interface, the Tennessee Secretary of State’s website will allow you to create your own LLC (or Corporation or Partnership) with basic information and a credit card in less than 15 minutes’ time. The process is incredibly, perhaps deceptively, simple.
This is by no means a criticism of the online formation process; the website displays the requisite legal notices and makes the process more accurate and efficient. However, the ease with which an LLC can be created may also downplay the responsibilities of running the entity to new or prospective “Members” (LLC owners). It is not uncommon that we receive calls from Members seeking an explanation of the “administrative dissolution” of their company. Many assume that unless the LLC is conducting certain business or making money, there is nothing that needs to be done. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Generally, there are two main culprits of administrative dissolution in these circumstances. The first is the annual report. Every LLC must file an annual report and pay an annual fee. These are usually due April 1 for the previous calendar year. The annual report is simple, and is predominantly concerned with any changes to the membership (ownership), registered agent, or address of the LLC. The annual fee is calculated in the same manner as the initial formation payment ($50/Member, with a $300 minimum and a $3,000 maximum). The report and payment can both be submitted online.
The second culprit is the Franchise and Excise Tax, which is imposed on nearly every registered entity in Tennessee, save for a select group which may qualify for an exemption. Franchise and Excise Tax is based on net worth as of the close of the year, but a minimum $100 payment is due annually, regardless of the LLC’s worth (or lack thereof). In order to pay this tax, the LLC must first register with the Tennessee Department of Revenue. This can also be done online, but the process is notably trickier than LLC formation.
The government websites referenced above both offer great resources and downloadable guides for anyone willing or interested in getting more information. The problem seems to be that some DIY LLC owners are unaware of additional requirements until after it is too late. Considering that forming an LLC is equivalent to creating a “person” in the eyes of the law, it only seems fitting that there should be some upkeep involved. Consulting a business attorney about LLC formation is the best route (unsurprising, coming from a business attorney), but to anyone looking to create an LLC, educating yourself on the requirements at the start can save a great deal of time, hassle, and money down the road.
