Contracts, agreements, and legal entities are tools founders can read, draft, and refactor like software — relationships with strings attached, not magic incantations left to lawyers.
Published
A good and important ruling was made the other day in the 9th Circuit Court in the US about amending contract terms. It is important for anyone who has a Terms of Service, User Agreement or similar on their site to understand this and what it means for them. In a nutshell the ruling says that you can’t just go changing …
Published
Note, this is all US related. You should probably skip the headache it’s certain to give you if you are not US based. I have long been a proponent of LLC’s for most startups. See for example Why the LLC is the Ruby on Rails of legal entities. However there are times that S-Corporations may be better. I have an S-Corp …
Published
In my last post Pragmatic contract law for entrepreneurs I covered the basics of contracts. It was pretty thin though with respects to covering jurisdictions. Jurisdiction basically means, who has the right to decide what happens over a contract in case of a dispute. As I mentioned before the legality of a contract …
Published
I am now sitting in Buenos Aires with my head full of debates back and forth across the Atlantic around Electronic Contracts, Electronic Signatures etc. for Tractis one of the projects I’m working on right now. I thought it might not be a bad idea to write some of my ideas out here publicly to perhaps open a debate a …
Published
Great news for people wishing to startup in an agile way and possibly seek funding later. Feld Thoughts has discovered new Delaware legislation making it easy to convert an out of state LLC to a Delaware Inc. Delaware Inc’s are the prefered corporate structure of VC’s and wall street alike. The second innovation allows …
Published
As my readers know by now I really like the LLC there are however one or two valid reasons to stick with a S or C Corp if you are a US based company. Brad Feld has added another good reasons for why S-Corps may be preferable to LLC’s: While there are several advantages of an LLC over an S-Corp (ability to issue …
Published
I am Danish (well nearly ) and am currently operating my business out of Denmark. I have also had businesses in a variety of other countries, so I think I have a pretty good perspective of what you need in Denmark both for Danes, but also for foreign residents here. There is very little good information in English …
Published
I have started businesses in more than a few places now and I was thinking it would be really cool to have an unofficial bloggers guide to the legalities of starting a business in various places around the world. Current country guides: Denmark Panama Argentina I think would be great if other entrepreneurial bloggers …
Published
I am constantly getting questions emailed to me about LLCs, Incs, Ltds etc. because of the article Legal structures for bootstrappers I wrote. One misunderstanding many people have is about limited liability. To understand Limited Liability you first must understand that it was originally introduced to protect the …
Published
Why do we do it? We keep writing legal language to satisfy non existant lawyers that none of can afford anyway. I am not a lawyer (hmm I smell an evil recursive argument coming along), but I think a court (at least in common law countries) looks more at the intention than the language. This is why Click through …