We frequently tell clients and prospective clients that no matter what kind of business you own and no matter how much time you’d like to spend developing your products or providing your services, the thing that will take up most of your time as an entrepreneur is really marketing. You have to let potential customers and clients know about your products or services and why they should choose you over the competition. But how much can you really say about the competition in your advertising materials? ​

'​The Copyright Office has a new registration option for what it is calling “short online literary works,” which includes blog posts, social media posts, and other short online articles. If your business provides content via the Internet, should you be using this new registration option to protect your work? What about online courses, podcasts, and other content?

​There is a major change on the horizon that will impact filing requirements for the vast majority of our small business clients. In January of 2021, Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), which amended the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 (AMLA), to crack down on the use of shell companies to launder money.
 
You may be wondering, what does money laundering have to do with my small business? Unfortunately, shell companies are often used to hide who really owns a business and ultimately to hide assets, whether for tax evasion, to fund terrorism or other criminal activities, or to evade other financial obligations like child support. The CTA will require “reporting companies'' to provide information about the “beneficial owners” of the company to FinCEN (the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network).*

You might decide to close your business for a number of reasons. Perhaps it is no longer financially feasible, or maybe you are moving on to something else. Regardless of the reason, there are several legal tasks you’ll need to undertake to protect yourself, your credit, and your reputation within the community—especially if you think you might want to have another business someday.

​Forming a business entity like an LLC or a corporation typically provides limited liability protection to the owners. But in certain situations, you can find yourself personally on the hook for the debts and obligations of the business. This week we’re discussing the legal concept of “piercing the corporate veil” and why it’s used so often against small business owners.

If you’ve worked hard to build your client or customer base, or even put significant time and effort into training your employees or recruiting the right subcontractors, you probably want to protect that investment. Non-solicitation agreements are typically used by businesses of all sizes to ensure that their employees and subcontractors will not solicit (or run off with) the company’s customers, clients, or even other employees or contractors that the company has worked so hard to find and develop in the first place. ​

If your business has a web presence (and in the 21st century, you really should), then you probably need a privacy policy on your website. Several relatively recent laws require business websites to post a privacy policy, but these laws aren’t universal in their applicability, especially when it comes to small businesses. Complicating matters, this area of the law is developing and changing rapidly.

According to a recent survey, customers are not only starting to care about their online privacy, but they are also willing to take action to protect their privacy, even going so far as to switch businesses or service providers because of their privacy policies. This means your customers are increasingly likely to want to know what data they are giving up when they interact with your business and what your business is doing with all that data in the first place. In this post, we’ll talk about the legal requirements for your website privacy policy: What should be included in your privacy policy? What are some best practices for keeping your privacy policy up to date?
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