Often when I’m advising small business owners I tell them that they need to assemble a Management Team. After telling me they can’t afford a management team, many of my clients ask: What does a management team look like? Who would be involved in that...
As a small business lawyer, I am often asked, “Do you write plain English contracts?” If I am feeling particularly snarky and I know the person well enough to be snarky, I might shoot back with “well, I don’t write contracts in Spanish, Latin, or...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JHF-CVDY6Q&feature=youtu.be When it comes to make better decisions in business or in life, we could all do with a better model of looking at decisions. The "all or nothing" model, the danger of hindsight bias and the often toxic regret of decisions leads to regularly poor...
Non-Compete Agreements are everywhere. Most non-competes I see are not only poorly written (a style problem) and probably unenforceable against the employee (a drafting problem). Most employers take a one-size-fits-all approach and have all employees sign the exact same non-compete. Employers wanting employees to sign...
I want to take the opportunity to address a couple common misunderstandings between legal entities and tax designations. One common question that we get is if I should form an S corporation. The answer to that question, actually, is that you can’t. Let’s step back and look at this...
I recently had a client with an interesting problem related to timekeeping practices. If you employ non-exempt (hourly) staff, in order to calculate their pay you need to have the number of hours that they worked in a pay period. A lot of folks use the good old...
We have another payroll issue that has been discussed by other bloggers, and the Department of Labor has issued an opinion on this. Believe me, if you want a cure for insomnia reading the Department of Labor opinion letters is a great option. In order to avoid you...
One of the most difficult things for companies looking to have key employees, or any employees, sign a non-compete agreement is that most states have at-will employment. While at-will employment is highly beneficial in terms of labor market movement and the ability for employers to...
One aspect of dealing with creative and service-based industries, as I often do, is that many employers have a non-compete agreement for their employees. I understand the desire and sometimes the need for the agreement. But as a class of agreements, non-compete agreements are among...