Commercial lawyers for South East Queensland business

It depends on liability, tax, who is involved and where you expect the business to go. A sole trader is simple and cheap but leaves you personally exposed. A company limits liability and is the usual answer once there is real risk or a second owner. A trust can offer flexibility in distributing income and asset protection. Partnerships are worth a specific warning: partners are liable for partnership debts jointly, so a partner's decision can become your debt. We work through it with your accountant rather than around them.

If you extend credit, deliver goods before payment, or do work to a specification, yes. Terms of trade set out payment terms, what happens on late payment, who carries the risk and how disputes are handled. They also let you take security over goods you have supplied, which is worthless unless it is registered on the Personal Property Securities Register. An unperfected security interest generally vests in the customer if they go into liquidation, meaning you lose the goods and rank as an unsecured creditor.

What you are actually buying, for a start: the assets and goodwill, or the shares in the company along with its history and its liabilities. Then the lease and whether it can be assigned to you, the condition and ownership of plant, any security interests registered against the assets, the contracts and licences that make the business work, and the employees. Employee entitlements on a sale are partly determined by statute rather than left to the parties, so what the contract says about them is not the end of the question.

For defined pieces of work such as a lease review, a set of terms of trade, a company set-up or a shareholders agreement, yes, and quoted in writing before we start. Disputes are harder to fix a price on because the other side controls half the work, so there we give you a costs agreement with staged estimates and tell you before we cross into the next stage.