Forming a business, obtaining its first licenses, and signing its early contracts settles the entity’s legal footing at one point in time. What follows is different: a recurring set of obligations to New York State, New York City, and the business’s own employees that has to be met year after year, not once at the […]
A company that has grown past $10,000,000 in revenue is usually thinking about how the business eventually changes hands: a sale to an outside buyer, a transition to the next generation, or new leadership stepping into ownership. That question shapes decisions long before any transaction is scheduled, from how the company keeps its records to […]
A company that has grown past $2,000,000 in revenue usually has more people making decisions than the owner alone, often more than one location or entity, and sometimes a bank loan that was not part of the business earlier. The legal work at this stage centers on documented decisions, signed agreements, and organized records, rather […]
A business past its first year or two usually looks different from the one that started it: a small staff, a lease with a renewal behind it, repeat customers, and enough money moving through the company that a disagreement over it is worth taking seriously. Many of its early agreements were informal, and those arrangements […]
This page covers the legal work that typically comes up for an owner-operator or an early-stage company generally earning under $500,000 a year. The revenue band is a guide to what tends to matter at this size, not a rule about what a business must have. A two-person consulting firm earning several times that amount […]
A shareholder agreement is a private contract among a corporation’s owners. It sets the rules for how ownership works: who can buy or sell shares, what happens when an owner dies, becomes disabled, divorces, retires, or leaves, how the company gets valued when shares change hands, and how owners resolve a disagreement. It covers ground […]
A business operating in New York City needs more than one kind of permission to legally open its doors. Licensing requirements come from several layers of government at once: federal, New York State, New York City, and sometimes the specific borough or local community board. Which of these apply to a given business depends on […]
Outside general counsel is what a business uses when it has enough legal questions to need a lawyer regularly, but not enough to justify hiring one as a full-time employee. The company works with an attorney who becomes familiar with its contracts, its ownership, and how it actually operates, and who handles matters as they […]
A non-disclosure agreement, often called an NDA or a confidentiality agreement, is a contract in which one party or both parties agree not to use or share specific information outside the purpose it was disclosed for. Signing one gives the business a contractual right to sue for damages, and in some cases to seek an […]
A contract is the document that decides what each side owes the other, and much of what it decides only becomes visible once something goes wrong: a late payment, a missed deadline, a disagreement over what was promised. Contract drafting and review covers both halves of that work: preparing a new agreement for your business […]
