Lunch & Learn: 10 Legal Pitfalls Startups Face
Entrepreneurial growth companies need to have their legal affairs in order. They are likely to undergo increasingly close legal due diligence in the context of future rounds of financing and their ultimate exit event. If they haven’t properly tended to the legal side, the effects could be devastating.
The Horten CC “Startups: 10 Common Legal Pitfalls” course is aimed at identifying the key legal issues a startup needs to address. The presentation will be amplified with war stories from Michael Horten’s many years of working with early-stage companies. The course will be highly interactive -- enrollment will be limited to 20 participants. Course attendance also includes lunch!
In this class, we'll cover:
(1) Failure to incorporate early
(2) Choosing right legal entity
(3) Where to incorporate
(4) Failure to complete company establishment
(5) Failure to assign intellectual property/business to the company
(6) Protecting the intellectual property
(7) Failure to work out the relationship among the founders as owners, including covering all of the “what ifs”
(8) Failure to work out the relationship among the founders as coworkers
(9) Failure of founders subject to vesting to make a Section 83(b) election
(10) Establish the right incentive awards
About the Instructor
Michael Horten, Horten CC
Michael Horten is a US and European educated lawyer with over 40 years’ experience as a practicing attorney. Mr. Horten began his legal career with Sullivan & Cromwell in New York and Paris. He then spent 25 years with King & Spalding in Atlanta. At the end of 1999, he retired from the King & Spalding partnership to launch Horten CC, a virtual law firm that focuses on the needs of entrepreneurial growth companies.
Horten CC employs a non-traditional practice model that is based on two key philosophical underpinnings: First, Mr. Horten founded the firm on the premise that top-rate legal services do not have to be bundled with the "marble" and "mahogany" environment that typically is associated with those services. The firm has no central offices, no paper files and it uses the latest technology to create efficiencies. As a result, the firm’s fees are considerably lower than those charged by firms of comparable ability and quality. Second, Horten CC bills its clients for the value delivered and not for the time spent by the attorney. The firm does not keep track of every "six minutes," as is the norm in most law firms. The firm believes that its clients purchase its lawyers’ skill, not their time. The firm’s work is typically performed for a fixed fee.