[The Reading List — a regular feature of theContractsGuy — highlights blogs that are interesting enough that I check in regularly. Here’s a link to other Reading List posts.]
Business Law Post is a no-nonsense, accessible blog about business law issues. It’s published by Arina Shulga, a former Cleary Gottlieb associate and current solo practitioner in the Big Apple. Arina is also involved in a start-up that produces apps for children, a fact that I discovered from her excellent guest post Legal Considerations for Mobile App Developers on the Moms with Apps Blog, which of course I read regularly.
Here are a few of Arina’s posts to give you a flavor for the blog:
M&A 101. In When Buying a Business: Asset Purchase vs Stock Purchase? and the aptly titled When Buying a Business: Asset Purchase vs Stock Purchase? Part II, Arina discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of basic deal structure choices — a topic that is near and dear to my heart and crucial to my financial well-being.
Business-Starting Advice. 11 Steps/Lessons to Starting Your Own Business covers several issues that new business owners should consider. The post deals with concepts such as registering your domain name and protecting your ideas. There are 11 items, but the post really gets going at step four.
Practical Stuff. New York City M/WBE Business Certification — Don’t Miss the Opportunity to Grow Your Business captures an aspect of the blog that I find refreshing: it covers down-to-earth issues in real English. I wonder who the target audience of some of the law blogs I follow and enjoy reading is supposed to be. I’m not talking about 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, the Conglomerate, or Adam Smith, Esq. — blogs for a relatively pointy-headed audience. No, I’m talking about blogs that seem to be meant for client consumption but which I enjoy way too much for one to really expect real-life business people to read them. I could envision genuine entrepreneurs checking in at Business Law Post to learn something they might need to know about law and business.
The Limits of Limited Liability. One of the things I like about the blog is that it has a clear New York flavor. I don’t mean a plain-spokenness that could rattle the sensibilities of a Midwesterner, but rather that the blog deals with New York law. Let’s face it, although none of us in my neck of the woods want to think that we live in a fly-over state and that the east coast is somehow more important, New York is more important. Like it or not, we’re all New York lawyers in some small sense, because when the company from Nebraska insists on a Nebraska choice of law provision and I insist on Missouri law, we’re likely to end up in either New York or Delaware. So New York law tidbits are always welcome in my regular reading rotation. Personal Liability of New York Shareholders is one such welcome tidbit.
Eeny Meeny Miney Mo. Arina wrote a four-part series comparing the corporate law of various states. There’s plenty of good information in How to Choose State of Incorporation for Start-ups: A Comparative Study of Delaware, Nevada, and Wyoming Legislation: Part 1. My only observation is that she left out the two most important states: Missouri and New York. I’ll leave it to interested readers to rustle up the other three posts in the series.
