June 12, 2018

As you are discussing things with your estate planning attorney, you may have already started or are considering starting a new business venture. You will have individual estate planning as well as business planning concerns that may have separate sections for estate planning and may be interconnected in some ways. There is no better time to protect your business than at the start of launching a company, but you can still benefit from business succession planning and estate planning if you have already been in business for some time. One of the most important things to protect is your trade name when you launch a company. 

The name of a business is one of the issues that is resolved first in launching a new venture, but often, clients don’t give much thought on how to protect that name because they don’t realize that there is much to protect or are too busy with other issues. There is no better time, however, to protect your business’s name at the start of its use, simply because starting a new business doesn’t mean that your firm is automatically protected.

Additional effort is required and may involve other professionals such as an intellectual property attorney in addition to the estate planning professional you are currently working with. Scheduling a consultation directly with an attorney who can advise you about how your individual estate planning and your business succession planning may intersect, is important.