2019 Schedule
Designer
Structuring for Success: A Legal Toolkit for Startups, by a Startup: Part 2 of 2
Startups face a myriad of legal hurdles, which can distract from your core mission and cause significant headaches down the road, especially if you are looking for a profitable exit. Successful startups will need to decide what type of entity to form, adopt operative agreements for the business, navigate complex intellectual property and brand protection issues, ensure proper employment practices are in place, and negotiate commercial leases in order to secure a home for their startup. The best startups will make these decisions quickly and with confidence, so they can focus on generating revenue. In short: building a successful business can be a legal minefield, but done right, these headaches are avoidable. This workshop presents a unique opportunity to take a free, two-day workshop from the law firm Milgrom & Daskam.
This two-day workshop will help you navigate your startup’s journey from the first days of entity formation through to securing your intellectual property for competition, bringing on staff, and leasing office space. As a startup firm ourselves, we are intimately familiar with the roadblocks facing new companies and how to address them painlessly.
The first day will focus on the basics: setting up your entity, building your corporate structure, and protecting your intellectual property. The day will be kicked off by our in-house expert in corporate entity structure and formation, Alex Kimata. Alex will help you to understand which entity makes sense for your company, how to form the entity, and the key provisions in your fundamental corporate documents. At Milgrom & Daskam, we like to keep things interesting, so we will take an interactive approach and will walk one individual through the process of setting up her entity so that all participants leave knowing how to do so themselves. Next, founder and managing partner Jon Milgrom will talk about how to maximize and protect the core value of your startup from a legal point of view: your brand. You will learn how to identify, categorize, and protect your intellectual property (“IP”) (aka your brand and all the work behind it). Jon will walk participants through an exercise where you identify and categorize your IP, and then as a group you will discuss how to protect such IP.
The second day will be focused around the next steps of building your business—employment and real estate. Partner Amanda Milgrom will discuss employment law for startups. Specifically, she will discuss the critical differences between independent contractors and employees through an interactive process. You will walk away knowing whether to bring on new staff as contractors or employees, which can have severe legal implications if done wrong, but can bring outstanding value if done right. Our expert in corporate leasing, John Daskam, will then help you understand the best way to find a home for your startup – without falling prey to common pitfalls in commercial leasing for startups. Participants will gain a strong understanding of how to negotiate a commercial lease for their company, including which provisions are critical to startups.
After this two-day workshop, you will walk away with a lot less uncertainty, and a lot more confidence around how to start your company out on the right foot.