Preparing for
Your Legal Intake

Why are Legal Services Important for My Business?

• Legal services help you reduce risks to your business by making sure your business has the legal infrastructure needed to support and protect it as it continues to grow.

What is the Legal Intake?

• The legal intake is where we assess your business’ current legal needs. The main focus of the meeting is to gather information from you and prepare specific legal referrals to help pair you with our network of volunteer lawyers. Start Small Think Big (SSTB) does not provide legal or tax advice during the intake. As noted in the Service Agreement you signed, SSTB is not offering to provide you with legal representation; instead, it is our goal to connect you with a volunteer attorney who can provide you with legal representation. During the intake, we will ask you questions about your business and discuss general areas of business and transactional law to better understand what your business’s legal needs are at this time.

  After the intake meeting, SSTB will send you draft “legal referrals,” which summarize the legal issues discussed at the intake. After you review and approve the legal referrals, SSTB works to pair you with volunteer lawyers to provide you limited scope legal services. The services are specific to, and only address, the issue(s) raised in the legal referrals.

What Legal Services do SSTB Volunteers Offer?

The most common legal areas our volunteer lawyers offer services in include:

• Business entity formation (e.g., advice on limited liability entities, like LLCs)
• Corporate governance (e.g., drafting operating agreements or partnership agreements)
• Contracts (e.g., drafting/reviewing wholesale contracts or client services agreements)
• Commercial leasing (e.g., reviewing commercial leases you have received)
• Doing business online (e.g., terms of use and privacy policies)
• Intellectual property (e.g., trademark, copyright, trade secrets, patent)

You may not need all of these services, nor may they all be available to you at any given time, depending on volunteer capacity; however, these are the main topic areas that may be discussed during your legal intake meeting.

Please note: SSTB does not assist with or provide legal advice or representation for any legal dispute, including lawsuits or litigation-related work.

How can I prepare for my legal intake?

The legal intake will include discussion of your business legal structure, contracts you use in your business, online business practices, and other potential legal issues.  Note that the legal intake is not intended to be a comprehensive legal assessment or review of your business.  However, you can prepare for your legal intake by thinking about the legal issues or questions you may have related to our areas of legal services. Below are some questions to consider prior to the intake:

Business entity formation and corporate governance

• Are you a sole proprietor or do you have a separate business entity? (e.g. limited liability company, corporation, etc.)
• Are you considering changing your business structure?
• What name(s) do you do business under?
• Do you have an operating agreement or bylaws for your business entity?

Contracts

• Does the business use or have written contracts?
• Does the business have any current or future contracts that need to be drafted or reviewed?

Commercial leasing

• Do you rent a commercial space for the business?
• Do you have questions or issues related to a commercial lease?

Doing Business Online

• Do you have a website? If so, can clients/customers purchase any products or book any services through your website?  Do you collect personal information through your website?
• Do you have a privacy policy and terms of use for your website?
   

Intellectual Property

• Do you have questions about  trademarking brand assets, copyrighting creative works, or patenting an invention?
• Have you had a trademark search done on your business name, logo, or slogan?

There is no need to send us anything in advance of the legal intake.  Beyond thinking about what legal issues you have questions about or would like to discuss with us, there is nothing more for you to do!