5 Tips to Plan Your 2023 Legal Strategy

Not sure what to focus on for your 2023 legal strategy? Tune in for a few legal areas that always need attention at the beginning of the calendar year and my best advice for planning a legal strategy that evolves with your business throughout the year.

Key Takeaways

• There is no such thing as one legal strategy that will get you through the year no matter where you are in business. Your legal strategy needs to be tailored to your stage of business and your goals
• At least one thing is tied to the new year: update the copyright notice on your website footer and all new content to 2023
• The new year is a great time to check in wit your contracts to make sure they reflect how you actually provide your service and any changes you're planning to implement in the new year

Resources Mentioned

• Watch the free masterclass 
• Follow Amy on Instagram @artfulcontracts

Next Steps

Thank you so much for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please reach out and let me know by sending me a DM on Instagram @artfulcontracts

Here are a few other steps you can take to support the podcast:

• Leave a review on Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher
• Share the episode on social media and tag me @artfulcontracts

Episode Transcript

Hello, hello, happy new year. I know we are 10 days into the new year at this point, but I took some time off and recharged a little bit between Christmas and New Year's, and we're just this is the first podcast of 2023. So happy New Year. Nice to see you again. Now, of course, at the New Year, at this time of year, everyone is talking about either reflections from last year or planning their strategy going into the upcoming year. And so my plan for this podcast episode was to give you your 2023 legal strategy.

And to be totally honest, I was kind of resisting recording this episode. I was feeling some resistance around it. And I just had this realization that the reason is because it's so arbitrary. The new year is so arbitrary. And yes, it's good to have milestones, it's good to have times where we stop and reflect and make plans, but I didn't feel like the new year was really authentically lining up with my opinions around what you needed to plan for your legal strategy.

So I was having a hard time like manufacturing something to say on that. Uh, and now I feel a lot better that I've come to that realization. I have never been someone who makes New Year's resolutions, and I have enough of a verbal side in me that I just really resist it when anyone tells me I have to do anything. So this whole new year, new year, new you, like make a new plan for the new year and arbitrarily decide to change things doesn't work for me. But I also recognize that a lot of the world functions on a calendar, and so that it does kind of make sense to have something started the new year.

So I'm going to give you a few tips, a few things to think about for your legal strategy because it's the beginning of the year. And then I also want to mention a couple things that you should be thinking about anytime something new begins. And I'll explain that a little bit more. But there are some things that need to happen when you're starting something new, and so that might coincide with the beginning of the year or it might not. So let's do it.

Hey, I'm Amy Nesheim, licensed attorney for online business owners and founder of my own business, Artful Contracts. You're listening to Legal Made Easy, the show that makes the legal aspects of online business easy to understand and implement so you can grow your business with confidence knowing you've got it all covered. Let's dive in.

Alright, the first tip, the first thing that you need to bring into the new year with you, your contracts. I know a lot of people plan price increases around the new year or changes in the way you do services. It's kind of a nice natural breaking point to change things. So if you are going to change things or if you have changed things based on the new year, then you need to update your contracts. And it's also a great time to just reflect back on the last calendar year and think about when is the last time I changed my contracts versus when is the last time I changed the way that I actually deliver my service.

If you have changed a policy or changed a way that you do things in your business as it relates to your client services, for example, if you changed the deadline for deliverables, if you change the number of revisions that you typically offer, if you change your inclusions or packages in any way, now is a great time to go through your contracts and make sure that your contracts as written match what you actually do when you're working with a client. They should always, always match.

All right, number two, this is a quick one. Go change the date on the bottom of your website. Change your copyright date to 2023. And that is absolutely tied to the calendar because it should always on your website at least, it should always be up to date with the date that you made your last changes. And as the calendar rolls around, we should update that date at the bottom. So it should say, and if you if you don't know I'm talking about, I'm talking about the copyright footer. So the the copyright symbol, the C with a circle around it, the year 2023, and your business name, your legal business name.

That should be at the footer of your website. And if you have any digital downloads or anything that you're putting out this year, make sure that if you copy an old template over, you're updating the date in the bottom of that footer too. If it had the old date on it, make sure you update it to 2023. The copyright date should always be the date of the most recent update.

Alright, tip number three. Now is a really great time to start setting up systems for your bookkeeping if you haven't already. I was talking with my sister-in-law a few weeks ago around Christmas time, and she said that she was telling me how she dreads this time of year every year because she has an Etsy handcrafted business and she hates, hates, hates doing her books because she does it all at once. She does it all when she needs to for tax time, and then it's a real pain in the butt to get it all together when she's thinking about transactions that happened a year ago.

So if that's you, know that you are not alone, but you are at the beginning of a year, it's a perfect time to have a fresh start with your bookkeeping starting January 1. Get some habits in place to make sure you're tracking transactions at a minimum on a monthly basis. As your transaction volume increases, this becomes so much more important because you can get really, really behind. And then it's a big struggle to get caught up. I'm not a bookkeeper. Um, I actually I hired a bookkeeper as soon as I possibly could because I didn't want to deal with all of this, but I mention it because it is so important for if you have an LLC, maintaining that legal wall in between you and your business.

And it's an important habit to grow your business. You can only grow what you can measure, right? And if you do decide to form an LLC in the future, even if you don't have one now, you will have to do it. So getting that habit, practice, that system in place is really helpful.

All right, and number four, totally piggybacks off of that. If you don't have an LLC yet, this is a good time once you have those numbers down to start thinking about it. So look at your revenue from last year, and maybe it was your first full year in business, maybe it's your first time that you are doing year-end numbers. It's a great time to think about do I want to have LLC protection for 2023?

And the reason the numbers are relevant is because I always say that it's important to have an LLC if you have a lot of risks in your business or you have a lot of personal assets that you want to protect or both. And if you have a lot of income or a lot of profit in your business, if your transaction volume is increasing, then that is an increase in both your risks and business because more transactions is more risk and your assets because your profit is money you get to take out of the business, and that's building your personal wealth too, right?

So if you want to be able to separate the risks of your business from your personal assets, then that's why you would need an LLC. Now, if you have an LLC, don't put those books away. Let's look at the numbers and decide if you should be forming an S-corp or if it's something you might need to think about next year. An S-Corp is just a way that you can be taxed with your LLC. It doesn't mean you have to change your legal entity or anything like that. It's just a way that if you have more than about $70,000 in profit in a year, then switching to S-Corp status can save money on taxes.

So it's important once you have your books done for each calendar year to check if you've reached that profit level and then talk to a CPA about making that transition. Alright, I guess I really had more time-tied things to say than I realized because a lot of the legal world does function relating to the calendar year. But I'm sticking to my guns and I'm still gonna say that a lot of your legal habits are not going to be tied to the calendar year.

I can't give you an entire game plan for your year that you can just do, you know, five things in January that's gonna set you up for the whole year. And here's why. Your legal strategy depends on your business. It has to be personal to your business, it has to be customized to what you actually do, and it's going to change and evolve over time. When you do something new in your business, it's up to you as the legal department for your business to think about the legal implications of making that choice. So that means that you have to on an ongoing basis, and anytime you do something new in your business, think of that as a trigger.

Okay, what is the legal consequence of making this choice? What things do I need to do because I've made this choice? And to just give you some examples of that, maybe so far you have only functioned with word of mouth marketing or social media, and then you decide to put up a website. Putting up a new website is the trigger to know, okay, I need to take some legal steps to protect that website. I need to get my terms and conditions in place, my privacy policy, my disclaimers.

If you decide to offer a new service in your business, then you need to get a contract in place for that new service. You need to create a template designed for use with that package, that new package. You can't just use the same contract that you had for your old package because the services are not going to be the same. Now, yes, you can take that old old contract and tailor it to the new offering, but you still have to do that. That's still a step you have to take.

If you write a new sales page for a new offer, you need to think about how am I marketing this? What am I saying on this sales page? And do I need to have any marketing disclosures on this page? If I'm using testimonials or I'm talking about potential earnings, then you're going to have to have a testimonials disclaimer or an earnings disclaimer at the bottom of that sales page. If you decide to launch an affiliate program, you're going to have to implement an affiliate agreement and also make sure that your affiliates are marketing in a legal way because there are disclosures required. You know, you see the hashtag ad, hashtag affiliate. You have to make sure that your affiliates are using those disclosures when they make posts for your business, promoting your business.

So I think you see what I'm getting at is that each stage of development of your business, each choice that you make, each new offer that you create, each new way that you market is going to have necessary legal steps that go along with it. And your legal strategy has to be reactive and reflective of those new choices that you make in your business. And so I can't come on here and say, all right, here's the 10 things that you are going to have to do this year. And we're going to start one of them in January and one of them in March because it is totally dependent on the marketing choices that you're making on your profit levels.

You know, if you're going to form an S Corp, that's dependent on your profit levels. It depends on your packages and it depends on how you're communicating your marketing. And I will do my best throughout this year to give you the understanding, give you the information to distill, you know, which pieces you need to implement based on which steps, which new things you're implementing in your business, because that's what I'm here for. But you're the one who's going to have to say, oh, I just did this new thing. I just wrote this new sales page. Let me go back and listen to that episode about marketing disclosures, something like that. You know, note to self. I should do an episode on marketing disclosures.

All right, just to recap really quick, there are some things that you need to do that are time calendar based at the beginning of 2023. It's a good idea to go back and check that all your contracts are up to date with either anything new that you implemented in the last year or any changes that you're planning on starting this year so that your new clients have the right contracts. Second, go update your website footer, the copyright line, so that it has 2023 instead of 2022 in it. Third, it's a great time of year to kickstart your bookkeeping habits if you haven't already. So so important. Uh, and that relates to number four, which is form your LLC if you haven't already, or look back at those numbers from last year and think about whether you need to form an S Corp and talk to a CPA if you think you do.

And throughout 2023, this is my tip number five. Anytime you do something new in your business, think about what the legal ramifications of that decision are. Because you're adding this new thing in your business. What does that mean for the legal aspects of your business? Do you need to create a new contract? Do you need to add in some disclaimers? Do you need to change something about the way that you operate to protect your business more? Alright, that's it. I hope you're having a great beginning of your new year so far, and I'll talk to you next week.