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by Jason Fischer

If you’re running your own small business, and you don’t have a holding company for your intellectual property, you should make an appointment to have your head examined.  Creating a separate entity, solely for the purpose of owning your IP, is the quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to insure the goodwill associated with your business.

I realize that the subject matter of this post is a bit drier than what you may have grown to expect from Tactical IP, but I’m hoping that at least a few of our readers are here for free tips on how to make their intellectual property work for them.  With that in mind, I’ll try to keep this light and painless.

Liability protection is the name of the game when it comes to creating business entities.  Think of it like an insurance policy.  If you do it right, assets can be protected from creditors, including judgment creditors who may have prevailed in a lawsuit.  As far as the law is concerned, a properly created and maintained business entity is a separate “person” from its owners and employees.  The benefit of that treatment is that, if the property created and maintained business entity incurs debts or gets sued, its assets are the only things that may be taken — not the assets of its owners.  Let’s look at an example to really hammer this point home.

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