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Moss Law, PLC, 4190 Telegraph Road , Ste. 3000, Bloomfield Hills, MI (2026)

05/02/2026

Get it in writing from the start. Every time.
Because sweat equity is a real and legitimate way to bring a contributor into a business. But "we have an understanding" is not a sweat equity agreement. It is a future argument waiting to happen.

Someone builds your website. Someone handles your marketing for the first six months. Someone puts in 60-hour weeks helping you get the business off the ground, and instead of a paycheck, they are going to receive an ownership stake when things take off.

This arrangement is more common than you might think. And it is one of the areas where I see the most preventable disputes.

A proper sweat equity agreement should spell out:
✓ What exactly the person is contributing. Hours, deliverables, milestones. Not just a general description of the role.
✓ What ownership percentage they will receive and when. Is it immediate? Does it vest over time? What happens if they leave before hitting certain benchmarks?
✓ What happens to that ownership if the relationship ends early. On good terms or bad.
✓ Whether their contribution is being tracked anywhere in writing along the way.
✓ What their rights as an owner actually are once the equity kicks in. Voting rights, distributions, decision-making authority.

The people who get hurt in sweat equity situations are almost always people who trusted a handshake because the relationship felt solid. And the disputes that follow are painful precisely because they often involve people who genuinely cared about each other and the business.

Get it in writing from the start. Every time.

05/02/2026

Get it in writing from the start. Every time.
Because sweat equity is a real and legitimate way to bring a contributor into a business. But "we have an understanding" is not a sweat equity agreement. It is a future argument waiting to happen.

Someone builds your website. Someone handles your marketing for the first six months. Someone puts in 60-hour weeks helping you get the business off the ground, and instead of a paycheck, they are going to receive an ownership stake when things take off.

This arrangement is more common than you might think. And it is one of the areas where I see the most preventable disputes.

A proper sweat equity agreement should spell out:
✓ What exactly the person is contributing. Hours, deliverables, milestones. Not just a general description of the role.
✓ What ownership percentage they will receive and when. Is it immediate? Does it vest over time? What happens if they leave before hitting certain benchmarks?
✓ What happens to that ownership if the relationship ends early. On good terms or bad.
✓ Whether their contribution is being tracked anywhere in writing along the way.
✓ What their rights as an owner actually are once the equity kicks in. Voting rights, distributions, decision-making authority.

The people who get hurt in sweat equity situations are almost always people who trusted a handshake because the relationship felt solid. And the disputes that follow are painful precisely because they often involve people who genuinely cared about each other and the business.

Get it in writing from the start. Every time.

04/30/2026

Get it in writing from the start. Every time.

Because a lot of businesses are built on improvisation.

The contract gets signed without being fully read. The partnership kicks off on a handshake and good intentions. The employee handbook is something the owner found online at 11pm and slightly tweaked without realizing it was based on CA law.

And for a while, sometimes a long while, this works. Because most of the time, business relationships are fine. Most deals close without incident. Most partnerships run smoothly right up until the moment they do not.

The problem with winging it legally is not that it fails every time. It is that when it fails, it tends to fail in ways that are expensive, disruptive, and very hard to unwind.

The cost of fixing a legal problem almost always exceeds the cost of preventing it. I have seen this play out more times than I can count.

I am not sharing this to create anxiety. I share it because I genuinely enjoy helping business owners build something that lasts, and the ones who build durable businesses are consistently the ones who treated legal foundations seriously even when things were going well.

April was a good month. I hope it was for your business too.

If there is something on your legal to-do list that has been sitting there a little too long, maybe May is the month. I am here when you are ready.

04/28/2026

Get it in writing from the start. Every time.
Because nobody starts a business partnership thinking about how it ends.

You are excited. You trust this person. The whole thing feels like a great idea, and it may be. This is not the moment when most people want to sit down and talk about what happens if one of you wants to sell, becomes disabled, files for divorce, or passes away.

But that document, called an operating agreement or a buy-sell agreement, is one of the most important things a multi-owner business can have in place.
Think of it as a business prenup. Nobody loves talking about it at the beginning. Everyone is grateful it exists when things get complicated later.

Here is what a well-drafted operating/buy-sell agreement addresses:
1️⃣ What happens when an owner wants out. Can they sell to anyone? Do the remaining owners have the right to purchase that interest first? At what price and under what terms?
2️⃣ What happens when an owner passes away. Does their ownership interest pass to their estate? Do surviving owners have a right to buy it back? Is there life insurance in place to fund the buyout?
3️⃣ What triggers the agreement. Divorce, bankruptcy, retirement, disability. These are all events that can affect ownership, and a buy-sell agreement can define in advance exactly how each one is handled.

The time to have this conversation is before you need it. If your business has more than one owner and no buy-sell agreement exists, this is worth a real conversation sooner rather than later.

Get it in writing from the start. Every time.

04/27/2026

If you follow college sports, you've heard "House v. NCAA" everywhere lately. Here's what it actually means.

For decades, the NCAA banned college athletes from earning money from their name, image, and likeness (NIL). A group of current and former athletes argued that violated antitrust law. They were right.

On June 6, 2025, a federal court approved a landmark nearly $3 billion settlement. Here's what changed:
→ Schools can now pay athletes directly up to about $20.5 million per school in year one, increasing annually over the 10-year deal.
→ Former athletes who competed between 2016 and 2024 are owed back pay for NIL earnings they were denied. Football and basketball players receive the largest share, but all Division I athletes may be eligible.
→ Scholarship limits are gone. Each sport now operates under roster caps instead.
→ New governance structures are being created to oversee how schools comply with the settlement’s payment and roster rules.

Big questions still unanswered: whether college athletes qualify as employees, and how Title IX applies to direct payments. Both will likely produce the next wave of litigation.

The NCAA ran college athletics on amateurism for decades. Courts finally said that model violated the law. The business had to follow.

"We've always done it this way" is never a legal argument.

04/24/2026

On April 3, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Urgent National Action to Save College Sports.” It is his second executive order on college sports in less than a year, and by far the more sweeping of the two.

Effective August 1, 2026, the order tells the national governing body and federal agencies to move toward:
→ A five‑year eligibility window. The order urges the governing body to limit college competition to a five‑year window, with limited exceptions for military and missionary service and similar public‑interest absences.
→ Stricter transfer limits. Athletes could transfer once as undergraduates with immediate playing eligibility, and gain a second immediate‑eligibility transfer only after earning a four‑year degree.
→ NIL guardrails. The order targets “fraudulent NIL schemes,” including pay‑for‑play arrangements and collective payments that don’t reflect genuine fair‑market NIL value, and tells the governing body to crack down while directing federal agencies to treat serious violations as a red flag for grants and contracts.
→ Protection for women’s and Olympic sports. Revenue‑sharing rules are supposed to preserve or expand scholarships and collegiate opportunities in those programs, rather than reduce them.
→ A real enforcement threat. Schools that engage in serious, proven violations of eligibility, transfer, revenue‑sharing, or NIL rules can be treated as unreliable federal grantees or contractors, putting some federal funding at risk.

The NCAA and the major conferences publicly welcomed the order and again called on Congress to pass the SCORE Act as a permanent solution.

Multiple attorneys have already said the order conflicts with existing court rulings and may not survive legal challenge. Executive orders are not legislation; they’re subject to court review, and courts have previously blocked or narrowed other Trump executive actions in related education and civil‑rights contexts.

Comprehensive federal legislation like the SCORE Act would resolve many of these uncertainties. That still hasn’t happened.

The landscape is moving fast. I’ll keep watching it.

04/23/2026

Most people know you can trademark a name or a logo. Here are some things that are actually protected under intellectual property law that might surprise you:

A sound. The NBC chimes have been trademarked since 1978. MGM's lion roar is registered. Harley-Davidson once spent years trying to trademark the distinctive sound of their engine.

A color. Tiffany blue. UPS brown. The specific shade of red on the bottom of a Christian Louboutin shoe. Colors can be trademarked when they are distinctive and consistently associated with a single source.

A scent. Crayola successfully registered a trademark for the smell of their crayons, described officially as "a scent reminiscent of a slightly earthy soap with pungent, leather-like clay undertones." It took nearly six years and extensive scientific evidence to accomplish.

The shape of a product or its packaging. The silhouette of a Coca-Cola bottle. The look of a Pringles can. Trade dress protection covers the distinctive appearance of products when that appearance identifies the brand.

What is the most unexpected thing you have heard of being trademarked?

04/22/2026

Happy Earth Day! 🌍

Every year on this day I think about the long game.

The environment. My health. My business. The relationships I have built with clients over the years.

The things worth protecting are worth being intentional about. You do not protect what matters by accident.

That applies to the planet. And honestly, it applies to your business too.

Whatever you are building, make sure you are protecting it on purpose.

Happy Earth Day. Go outside if you can today. It helps.

Moss Law, PLC

05/02/2026

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04/30/2026

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