A corporation or an LLC? How to best provide early employees with equity? What if a founder doesn’t work out? Who owns the critical IP, and what IP rights will your startup need? Who should be on the board of directors? How do you maintain an effective board? What should your HR policies be?

We help startups work through these issues and many others so that the founders, employees and advisors have the right incentives to perform and have the right agreements and practices in place to avoid complications when it comes time to seek financing or an acquisition.

Money is the lifeblood of startups, and we’ll help you navigate the process of raising it through equity and convertible debt transactions ranging from “friends and family” investments through angel, seed and later stage investments.

We’ve represented clients in investment transactions at every level and with all types of investors, so we can work quickly through typical roadblocks, focus on key deal terms and business diligence and avoid wasteful arguments over the small stuff.

Buying or selling technology or services? Licensing your content, software or other IP? Selling your products or services through distributors or partnerships? Thinking of outsourcing development or operations? Or building and marketing something together with another company?

We’ll help you get the terms and incentives right for short- and long-term commercial agreements involving technology and services, from software licenses and hosting agreements to joint product development to business process and IP development outsourcing projects.

What you do with user data – how you get it, store it, protect it, send it to others and use it – is regulated by laws and agencies in the U.S. that vary from industry to industry. We help you navigate issues of data privacy, data breaches, privacy policies, email and telephone marketing, and advertising – across many industries including e-commerce, accounting, financial services, consumer products and education.

We also know privacy regulation in the EU and the U.S., both when doing business with EU nationals and when you’re transferring data within a company or to third party service providers.

If you’re being acquired or making an acquisition of your own, our strength is in working with you to quickly and efficiently negotiate a favorable deal that identifies and addresses the key business and technology issues. We’ll work with you through due diligence, signing and closing to help you understand the legal issues that come up and work through any roadblocks that arise.

When it makes sense to partner instead of combine, creating joint ventures and strategic alliances draws on our experience with mergers and acquisitions, entity formation, commercial agreements and IP strategy.

What IP rights does your company need to acquire, develop or license? When does it make sense – taking a strategic view of your business – to spend your time and money to formally protect media, software or other technology that you create? What are the long term consequences of building or buying IP? Or taking an open source approach?

We’ll help you develop and implement an IP strategy that makes sense for your company, work with you in filing copyrights and trademarks and efficiently engage our network of colleagues who specialize in patent prosecution.