If you or your business decides to go into a business transaction with another person or entity, you might be forming a joint venture. Joint ventures offer businesses a pathway to shared resources, expanded markets, and increased profitability. However, like any partnership, joint ventures can encounter challenges, particularly when it comes to owner disputes. One [...]
Your choice of business structure isn't just a checkbox on a form. It's a decision that can shape the entire trajectory of your business. Like laying down the foundation for a house, it affects everything from how you pay taxes to how you protect your assets. And let's face it, these decisions can make or [...]
In September of 2022, the United States Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) published a rule that generally requires all legal entities to register their owners with the federal government. By way of background, entities such as Corporations, Limited Liability Companies, Limited Partnerships, and others tend to be created by statute by individual States. Colorado, like [...]
I have been expecting the United States economy to enter a recession for some time now. Maybe this is because I watch the same news cycle as everyone else, with all of its sensationalist, doom-and-gloom forecasts. Maybe it was my experience representing businesses that struggled during the 2018 recession triggered by a housing bubble that [...]
I previously talked about a few common customer mentalities that lead to breakdowns in contracts between construction companies and customers. This time, I want to talk about the most difficult kind of problem to overcome from the contractor’s perspective: simple self-interest. What is Self Interest? “Self-interest” refers to a customer’s decision to do something because [...]
In my last blog post, I started talking about the customer mentalities that I see commonly leading to refusal to pay a contractor. The first case involved what I would term “buyer’s remorse,” which is where the customer decides they would be better off with a different contractor due to financial or communication issues. Except [...]
At Underhill Law, we do quite a bit of work involving collection related to construction contracts. We usually represent the contractor, but we sometimes represent the customer. In cases like these, we find the most important thing is to focus the parties on the original deal: workmanlike construction services in exchange for prompt payment. The [...]
When Colorado business owners choose the form of their business, they have several options. The most popular are probably the corporation, with directors and shareholders, or the limited liability company, with members and managers. The choice between the two often boils down to various accounting and tax considerations more than anything else, making a business [...]
One remedy available to those who perform construction work is the Mechanic’s Lien. In Colorado, this is a security interest in real property that is given to laborers or materialmen who do work on that property. It is a useful tool in ensuring payment on projects for a variety of reasons. It is a statutory [...]
While the public health emergency of Covid-19 may have ended, the legal ramifications of the pandemic will be with us for years to come. The federal government enacted many emergency steps to protect citizens and businesses during the pandemic and the shutdowns that followed, such as the CARES Act. One aspect of the CARES Act [...]
