In my previous article, I gave you some ways in which you can prepare yourself and your business when served with a lawsuit.

But how do you choose the best lawyer for your situation? It helps to think ahead to what you want both the experience and the outcome to be, and what you DON’T want them to be. Do you want the whole thing to be over as quickly as possible or are you willing to settle in for the long haul to get your desired results? How willing are you to compromise?

Once you have that image in your head, you can use the following questions to evaluate the lawyers that you are considering hiring.

While you may have outsourced all of this to a broker in the past, you can no longer afford to allow your investments to be made without your clear understanding of exactly what you are investing in, how and whether your investments align with your plans for the future.   

My colleague shared a story that hit home with me, and it may for you as well.

After my colleague’s grandmother died, her grandmother’s retirement and investment accounts went directly to her mom, due to the estate planning they had set up. No court process. No intervention. No conflict. Great!

But my colleague’s mom then never looked at the investments in those accounts. She just let them stay as they were for four years, until finally, her daughters convinced her to look. 

Even worse, the lawsuit may be reflected back to you your greatest fears about yourself and perhaps even about the work you do. But a lawsuit doesn’t have to spell the end of your business, nor the collapse of your dignity. Instead, it can be a big opportunity to see something that you otherwise couldn’t see about where you need to shore up holes and create systems to be able to grow your business.

If you haven’t already read it, my mentor wrote a Manifesto about the more than $1,000,000 mistakes she made when growing her business, including more than one lawsuit, and you can read that here, so you don’t have to make the same mistakes she did.

As your Personal Family Lawyer®, we’re dedicated to improving the public’s perception of lawyers by offering family-centered legal services specifically tailored to provide our clients with the kind of love, attention, and trust we’d want for our loved ones. With that in mind, this post gives some insight into how this vision for a new law business model first came about.

If you’re like most people, you likely think estate planning is just one more task to check off of your life’s endless “to-do” list.

You may shop around and find a lawyer to create planning documents for you, or you might try creating your own DIY plan using online documents. You’ll then put those documents into a drawer, mentally check your estate planning to-do list, and forget about them. 

And yet, many business owners don’t pay themselves or rely on inconsistent income, to support themselves. If that’s you, it’s time to make a shift now. 

In most cases, paying yourself a consistent income that at least meets your base personal needs should be the first and highest priority of your business. And when you pay yourself in the right way, you can also minimize your taxes while ensuring your business has what it needs to grow as well. 

Of course, owning your own business also means that if your company doesn’t earn enough money, you might not get paid at all. And in the worst-case scenario, if you don’t structure your business’ legal, financial, and tax systems properly, you could even find yourself in a situation in which you don’t get paid, and at the end of the year you end up owing taxes that your company can’t afford to cover.