Whether you own stock in a business or you run a business that has shareholders, understanding the rights of a stock owner can help you better protect your interests. Common shareholders in a company can: Exercise financial claims on the company Your stock comes with...
A good contract is designed to keep you out of lawsuits -- not put you right in the middle of one. However, some contracts can be more troublesome than others. If you're an entrepreneur who is just getting your fledgling business off the ground, these are the...
An errant text message or two is all it takes for your business to end up in court. A Tennessee resident has filed a federal lawsuit over unsolicited text messages he received from Florida's largest distributor of medical marijuana. Many of the state's 22 licensed...
Maybe you've never invested in real estate before -- or maybe you've had a few residential rentals for a while now. Either way, dipping your toes in the waters of a commercial property investment can seem terribly exciting for a change. But is commercial property...
Two of the most important parts of any contract are "offer and acceptance." Without them, your contract doesn't exist -- but most people aren't entirely clear on what offer and acceptance actually mean. What's an offer? Essentially, an offer is an expression of...
As a landlord, you know that evictions are sometimes necessary to reclaim your property from an uncooperative tenant. But what happens when your tenant claims that you violated the law by performing an illegal "constructive" eviction? Landlords can be accused of...
Fraud is a major problem in many industries. However, it often hurts small and medium-sized businesses the most. Fraud can not only hurt you financially, but it can also damage the relationship and trust that you've built with your clients, suppliers and other...
Retaliatory evictions occur when a landlord aims to evict a tenant because the landlord is angry over something the tenant was within his or her rights to do. Retaliatory evictions are illegal -- but that doesn't necessarily mean that your landlord won't try it anyhow...
Business disputes happen. You and a contractor may disagree on who is responsible for a project's failure. You may have to sue a client or distributor over a broken contract. But what about times when the lawsuit simply seems to come out of nowhere -- when the lawsuit...
It generally isn't illegal for an employee or former employee to criticize a business, but defamation by a disgruntled employee is another story. Defamation happens when someone makes a statement of fact that is knowingly false and that statement injures the other...
