Small and Mid-Sized Businesses
Our firm’s primary focus is serving the legal needs of small business and medium-sized businesses (SMB), whether your company is just starting up or it has existed for decades. Please review our “Services” page, which was constructed especially with the interests, priorities, and concerns of small- and mid-sized business owners in mind.
Most of our SMB clients have a limited in-house legal team or do not have any full-time attorneys on staff at all. Typically we work directly with the business’s primary stakeholders relating to the issue at hand (CEO, CFO, HR, finance, vendor management, marketing/PR, etc.), but enthusiastically collaborate with your internal lawyers or paralegals when applicable. We welcome clients who want to engage us for a specific and limited scope of services (e.g., to act strictly as the company’s outside employment counsel), as well as clients who want us to function as the company’s outsourced in-house counsel and manage nearly all legal issues on the company’s behalf.
In addition to the myriad services described on the “Services” page, we can advise you on any or all of the following most commonly asked questions from our SMB clients:
Employment Law:
- Are we correctly classifying our independent contractors and employees under applicable labor laws?
- Is our current employee handbook sufficient?
- What additional written policies do we need in place to protect ourselves from liability and comply with the law?
- How can we hire an all-star prospective job candidate?
- How can we fire a difficult and underperforming worker?
Commercial Contracting:
- Do we really need a written contract with this (vendor, supplier, customer, contractor, etc.), or is our verbal understanding and/or email exchange sufficient?
- We found a contract on the internet that we’ve been using—is this legally sound and enforceable?
- Our contracting partner has provided us with their own form of agreement that they insist on using—what is our risk exposure, and can we negotiate it to make it fairer and more favorable to our interests?
Corporate Governance:
- What are the company’s obligations with respect to meetings and recordkeeping?
- How do we decide when to make distributions of profits amongst owners?
- What happens if one owner wants to sell the business but the others don’t?
- What happens if an owner isn’t pulling his/her weight in business operations anymore?
- How do we take on additional partners?
Intellectual Property Law:
- Does our new logo or brand name infringe on anyone else’s trademark?
- When is the right time to seek trademark protection?
- How can we protect our IP from infringement?
- When we work with contractors, how can we be sure that the work they give us isn’t infringing on the intellectual property rights of others?
Data and Privacy Law:
- We copy/pasted a privacy policy from another website and are using it as our own privacy policy, is this okay?
- Do we really need to create a separate Terms of Use or Terms of Service document for our website?
- What type of information should go into an Acceptable Use Policy for the company’s computer systems, networks, and technology?
- Who is liable for data breaches under our current vendor agreements?