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There are a lot of issues to consider when you want to look into selling your business. A lot of them will have to do with what the market is sort of bearing for comparable businesses like yours that have sold recently. You can do some of that research online. There are other experts that can help do evaluation on your business depending on a lot of different factors in the industry that you’re in and, of course, you’re going to want to know tax-wise what the penalty is going to be against you individually when you sell your business as well as who assumes your liabilities and your current contracts.

At this point if you’ve already sued someone and have received a settlement offer then clearly you’re represented by legal counsel so I would say talk to your attorney. But, what you want to consider at this point is how much it’s going to cost you to keep moving forward, how much the offer is and what is owed.

You can file a lawsuit against someone that owes you money. Now, depending on the amount of money that is owed to you it might not make sense to run to the courthouse and file a lawsuit. I recommend to my clients to reach out first and see if we can come up with an agreement where we can settle out of court instead of incurring legal fees upon legal fees and running through a lawsuit which can take two to three years and cause a lot of stress.

There are steps you can take to reduce the likelihood of being sued. Of course anyone can sue anyone else at anytime. You know, you’ve heard of all of the silly lawsuits out there. It’s unfortunate but what you want to do is give yourself the most amount of leverage possible so that you reduce the likelihood that you will get sued and the way that you can do that is by having very strong contracts with some clauses in your contracts that state that if you are sued that the prevailing party is going to get attorney fees; that is a huge detriment to bringing a lawsuit which is if I lose I’m going to also have to pay for this person’s attorney’s fees.

I have a laundry list of questions that we would need to go over with the seller of the business before I would ever advise you to move forward with purchasing a business. You have to look at financials from three to five years in the past, you have to make sure that the proper insurances are in place and you’ve got to look at the debts compared to the liabilities and the profits.

Most import legal issues; that’s kind of a hard list to come up with and rank definitively first, second, third. But there are three that I can think of which if you don’t take care of these can really just screw up your business and your life potentially so you’re going to want to make sure of these three things and there are many others.

This is a tough answer because it depends on what you have in writing. What I mean is, what agreement do you have between you and your partner? Did you take the time to do a partnership agreement or an operating agreement when you started the company or did you guys just start, you know what, let’s open a business we’ll figure out later and then you never took the time to put in writing who has what rights and obligations.

If you think someone has stolen your intellectual property, which could be a logo or some sort of other trademarked insignia or a copyright you need to act quickly. There is an aspect of law called acquiescence that if you know and you’re on notice that somebody is using something that you have copyrighted or trademarked and you let it go on for long enough, potentially you could lose your trademark or copyright.

Well, when you’re sued the lawsuit actually begins when you are served with the lawsuit so you’ll have that unpleasant experience of a process server handing you a stack of papers that says you’ve been sued which is not a fun experience to go through. But don’t feel bad, it’s a part of business.

An LLC stands for, Limited Liability Company, and the reason that it has the moniker LLC is because truly the liability of the owner is supposed to be limited as opposed to a corporation who has a lot more exposure to liability through a lawsuit.