Business Law & Growth
If you're the kind of entrepreneur who wants to make a real difference while you're in business and leave behind a body of work that continues to do good for your family, your customers, and the world after you're gone, you've come to the right place.
Business formation is a pivotal time in your new company's lifecycle. Your choice of entity impacts ownership, liability, taxes, profit sharing, ongoing management, eventual sale, and much, much more. Sky Unlimited can help you make the ideal choice.
We help our clients leverage their IP, establish a competitive position for the future, and achieve important milestones for growth. Our chief goal is to identify key areas in which IP protection is the most critical for achieving the company's business objectives, determine the most effective methods of protection, and create strategies to avoid issues with third-party patents.
The traditional law business model is flawed. It incentivizes lawyers to spend more time on matters (since they are billing for every hour in six-minute increments), increase conflict (the more conflict there is, the longer the engagement), and constantly focus on the next new client (one off transactions are the norm in most legal practices). Plus, the world has shifted and quite a lot of legal work has become commoditized into online legal drafting software, documents on demand and do-it-yourself lawyering.
Lawyers, not being entrepreneurs, tried to compete and became mere shadows themselves - document drafters, doing one-off transactions for clients, such as incorporating business, and then went on the hunt for the next new client.
Not us! We build lifetime relationships with our clients. Because a legal relationship not built upon a lifetime foundation is worthless. Really. If you want a transaction, go online and find a document drafting service. If you want someone great that will help you move your awesome idea into a revenue generating business, take your existing business to the next level of excellence, and prepare you and your business to leave behind a legacy of significance, you've come to the right place.
Sky Unlimited Legal Advisory will work with you to grow your business from day one. We support startups and small businesses through their exciting lifecycle, from business formation to sale - and every challenge and opportunity in between.
Entrepreneur Weekly
Articles from the Chief Counsel's desk. Sign up for our newsletter to receive these in your email!
How Using The Right Legal Agreements Can Safeguard Your Intellectual Property
Using independent contractors (ICs) can give your company an edge in today’s thriving gig economy, but if you are not careful, contractors can also be a serious liability. In fact, working with ICs comes with a number of unique legal and financial risks that can be potentially ruinous to your business if not handled properly.
Beyond getting sued or hit with hefty fines for misclassifying an employee as a contractor, you must also be careful to properly secure ownership of anything an IC creates for you. This is particularly true when it comes to your intellectual property (IP).
And whether you know it or not, IP is one of your company’s most valuable assets. Indeed, a recent study found that up to 80% of the value of today's typical business is made up of different forms of IP.
Do You Actually Own The Work You Are Paying For?
Unlike employees, with whom you generally own automatic copyrights to everything they produce while working for you, ICs typically retain full copyrights to their work—unless they’ve signed a written agreement stating otherwise. Indeed, if you don’t have properly drafted agreements in place, you may not even own the work you pay ICs to produce for you.
What Happens To Your Business When You Get Sick Or Die? 4 Fundamentals To Know
If you dream of leaving your company to your family one day, but you haven’t properly included your business in your estate plan, that dream could become a nightmare for your heirs—and for your partners, team members, and clients, too.
In fact, properly planning for what would happen to your business upon your death or incapacity is one of the most important things you can do for your company.
Without a proper estate plan, the business you worked so hard to build could be in serious jeopardy when something happens to you. Not only that, but since your business is likely your most valuable asset, proactive planning is crucial not only for your company’s continued survival, but for your family’s future well-being as well.
Fortunately, you can use a few basic estate planning strategies to make sure your business survives your incapacity or death. Although you should consult with us, as your Family Business Lawyer™, to determine the specific planning vehicles that are right for your particular business and family situation, the following estate planning tools are essential for nearly all business owners.
4 Fundamental Asset Protection Vehicles For Business Owners
Regardless of the industry you are in, the reality of being a business owner is that you open yourself up to a number of unique risks that most people don’t have to worry about—and the more successful your business is, the more risks you face.
Unfortunately, most business owners aren’t fully aware of all the potential risks that can affect their company or the options available to protect their personal assets from the risks of doing business. This is where asset protection planning comes in.
Asset protection planning is designed to reduce or eliminate the risks of being in business by shielding your business and personal assets from lawsuits, creditors, and other potential threats to the fullest extent legally possible. And it’s absolutely crucial to have your asset protection strategies in place from the moment you open your doors, because once a claim or lawsuit is filed, it’s too late.
6 Essential Strategies For Starting A New Business
If you are thinking of starting a business, you’ll find all sorts of advice about how to go about getting your new venture off the ground. Indeed, there are entire websites devoted to the topic. Yet, with so much information out there, it’s hard to know what you should heed and what you can ignore.
To make things simple, we’ve compiled a list of six essential strategies for getting your new business up and running with the least amount of hassle and risk.
1. Solve A Problem
One of the best ways to come up with a winning business idea is to design your product or service to solve a specific problem. By fixing a problem, you’ll have a solid customer base right out of the gate, who won’t need much selling, provided your solution actually works.
If possible, create your business around a problem you’ve faced yourself, so you thoroughly understand and trust the value your company offers. If your business truly helps improve people’s lives, your success is virtually guaranteed.
5 Best Practices For Establishing Healthy Boundaries With Clients
Do you feel obligated to check work emails, texts, and voicemails at all hours? Do you often work evenings, weekends, and holidays, even after you promised yourself you wouldn’t? Do you feel pressured to say yes to pushy clients because it’s easier than saying no? Do you feel resentful of clients for placing unreasonable demands on your time?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you need to check your boundaries. Establishing and enforcing healthy professional boundaries with your clients is critical for all business owners, especially if you own your own business and work from home, where the lines between work and home life are easily blurred.
Unless you set and enforce healthy boundaries, rather than you controlling your business, your business will control you, which can quickly lead to overwhelm and burnout. At the same time, creating healthy boundaries allows you to take charge of your day, your business, and your life.
If you are ready to establish healthy boundaries with your clients, here are five strategies to help you get the process started.
Navigating Small Claims Court: What You Should Know
As a business owner, it’s inevitable that you will face minor conflicts and disputes at some point. Whether it’s a client who refuses to pay a bill, an independent contractor who fails to fulfill the terms of their agreement, or a vendor who stiffs you on an order, dealing with such issues is a simple fact of doing business.
However, given the time and expense involved, filing a lawsuit in civil court to resolve such minor disputes typically isn’t worthwhile, especially if you are only trying to recover a few thousand dollars. And taking the matter to a collections agency usually isn’t a viable option either, since average fees run between 25% to 50% of the total amount recovered.
If you can’t resolve the dispute privately, taking the case to small claims court may be your best option. Small claims courts are specifically designed to resolve relatively low-collar cases quickly and inexpensively, without the need to observe the complex formalities of traditional court proceedings, and without incurring costly legal fees.
If you are considering taking a case to a small claims court, here are a few answers to some basic questions about the process.
5 Cost-Cutting Tips To Reduce Your Company’s Expenses
When running a small business, every dollar counts, so it’s critical to keep a tight rein on your expenses, especially when you are just starting out and have limited revenue. If not monitored carefully, spending can quickly get out of control and put a serious strain on your operation’s financial health.
Outside of hiring an experienced bookkeeper to keep track of your expenses and monitor areas where you might be bleeding cash, there are several other ways you can keep your expenses in check. And you don’t need an accounting degree to put these strategies into practice.
With this in mind, here are five cost-cutting measures that can help your company stay in the black.
1. Encourage Remote Work
During the pandemic, telecommuting and remote work became the norm rather than the exception. And even now that the shutdowns are over, many companies are choosing to keep a large number of their workers at home or adopt a hybrid approach, allowing employees to work both from home and in the office.
3 Legitimate Reasons To Put Off Estate Planning—And How To Do Right By Those You Love
If you have yet to put in place an estate and succession plan for your business, you’re going to leave the people you love most—your clients, your customers, your team, and your family—in the lurch when something happens to you. And while that probably won’t be tomorrow, it could be.
We get it—there are plenty of reasons to put off estate planning, and as business owners ourselves, we truly understand the common excuses for why you probably haven’t created your estate plan yet. But we also know what to do about it, so you don’t leave the people you love at risk. Read on for the top three excuses to avoid estate planning, and what you can do to overcome those excuses and do the right thing for the people you love now.
1. I don’t have enough time.
When running a company, it can be a serious challenge just to get all of your most-pressing daily tasks done on time. This is especially true in today’s fast paced business environment, where you move from one task, one meeting, one email, one phone call, one text to the next—and before you know it… a year has gone by, and then another, and it just keeps going.
4 Issues To Consider When Trademarking Your Company’s Name
When it comes to your company’s brand identity, nothing is more vital to your company than its name. By developing a highly catchy name for your business, you can quickly get your company recognized, remembered, and respected.
That said, coming up with the right name for your company involves a number of critical legal issues. After all, your name is among your company’s most valuable assets, and as such, it deserves the proper protections available under intellectual property law.
First and foremost, you’ll want to trademark your company name, which can be done by registering your business name with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). However, registering a trademark with the USPTO can be a lengthy and complex process, especially if you aren’t familiar with intellectual property law.
With this in mind, while you should always work with an experienced business lawyer like us, your local Family Business Lawyer™ to officially register any trademark, here are four of the top issues to consider when choosing and trademarking your company name.
Ensure Your Intellectual Property Is Fully Protected & Leveraged With An IP/Brand Audit For Your Business
Although intellectual property (IP) has always been an essential part of most companies’ overall value, with the rapid rise of internet-based technology and e-commerce over the last few decades, IP is increasingly becoming the primary source of value for businesses both large and small.
In fact, studies show that today up to 80% of the value of a typical business is IP. And as of 2020, more than 84%—$19 trillion—of the S&P 500’s market cap is represented by intangible assets like IP.
Despite the critical importance of these assets, even the largest corporations aren’t always properly valuing or protecting their IP.
“Very few companies recognize the value of their intellectual property, nor have they secured an IP strategy that mirrors their long-term corporate strategy in order to maximize this value,” said Brian Hinman, Chief Innovation Officer at Aon and Head of EMEA for Aon’s Intellectual Property Solutions.