Autumn Witt Boyd: Hi there.

Autumn Witt Boyd: I'm Autumn Witt Boyd. I'm an attorney and I'm delighted to be joining the summit and sharing with you all about legal for online and creative entrepreneurs. I'm going to switch over to my PowerPoint here. Let's see if I can

Autumn Witt Boyd: Make it work. All right. Okay. Diving in.

Autumn Witt Boyd: So my standard disclaimer is that this is not legal advice. I am sharing information. It's meant to get your wheels turning help. You start to think about what you might need legally for your business, but this is not meant to be actual advice for your business. I am licensed in Tennessee. So all the information I'm going to be sharing is based on United States, copyright and trademark law. We're also gonna talk about contracts, but if you are in another country, this may still be helpful, but please don't rely on it.

Autumn Witt Boyd: Okay.

Autumn Witt Boyd: Hi, I'm Autumn. It's really nice to meet you. So a little bit about me, some quick background. Why do I know what I'm talking about? Why should you listen to me? A little background. So you can see here. This was Ooh, 15 years ago in my first job I worked for a judge after law school. That's what brought me to beautiful Chattanooga, Tennessee. You can see, I followed a very traditional lawyer path. I started working for a judge, worked at a small law firm, worked in a big law firm. And then in about 2014, you can see the picture on the far right. That's me with my twin boys and my husband, David. I kind of hit this brick wall if with working in traditional law firms, as I'm sure many of you have experienced before starting your own side hustle, you are just burnt out with your day job.

Autumn Witt Boyd: You are tired, you are frustrated, maybe you're bored. I was all of those things. I was overworked. I wasn't seeing my family as much as I wanted to. I actually had a ton of flexibility at that job. That was one of the best things about it, but it still just felt like this chain around my neck all the time. So that's when I decided to break out and start my own law firm. So now I've got, I need to update this slide we're at 15 years now, I've got more than 14 years of copyright and trademark experience. We've done, the law firm has done over 300 one-on-one legal projects with creative and online business owners. And we have really over the last five years since I started the firm in 2015, become the go-to law firm for online course creators, coaches and other online consultants.

Autumn Witt Boyd: So now this is what, what the world looks like for me. This is a picture from a dinner that I hosted in San Diego about a year and a half ago. You can see my friend now, client Amy Porterfield, Pat Flynn attended the dinner, a bunch of other people. So these are the kinds of people that we are really lucky and privileged every day to get to support. And I show you this picture, not to brag, although it's delightful. But because I want you to know that we are supporting the best of the best in this industry. We get to see, kind of peek behind the curtains of their business. We see what they're working on. We see the problems that they have, and we are able to now help them put things in place that are preventing and helping them grow, taking legal proactively. So that is what I want for you and your business. As you are growing from a side hustler to going full time, I want you to have the freedom and the confidence that comes with having a legal business that's truly protected. So I want you to just take a second and think for a minute before we dive into all the nitty gritty, can you imagine what it would feel like if you knew that you had all the right legal protections in place for your business?

Autumn Witt Boyd: I

Autumn Witt Boyd: Will tell you that covering all of your legal bases means you can confidently grow your course business or whatever kind of business you're growing without worrying that you're missing something important. So step one, I bet you thought I was going to go into something juicy and sexy, like copyrights or trademarks and we'll get there. But step one really is starting off on the right legal foot with anyone that you are working with, your clients, your customers, your contractors, and your collaborators. I want you to have a clear contract with each and every one of these people.

Autumn Witt Boyd: So here are

Autumn Witt Boyd: Some of the benefits of clear contracts for your business. I really think they are the most important legal protection for your business. I know they're not the thing that we talk about as much as maybe forming an LLC or some of the intellectual property, things that we talked about. And I am an intellectual property attorney by training. But, at the end of the day, when my eight figure clients, when my six figure clients, when my just starting out clients come and talk to me and they've got a problem, or they've got a sticky issue or something has gone wrong in their business and they are not sure what to do next. I would say probably 95% of the time the first thing I ask them is what does your contract say? It might be, if they are selling online courses, it might be an issue with a student not paying on time.

Autumn Witt Boyd: If they have a membership or an online community, it might be somebody, you know, causing drama in the Facebook group. If they are a one-on-one service provider, as I'm guessing, a lot of you are that certainly, how I started my business. It could be, you know, scope creep, where you thought you agreed to do one thing. And now all of a sudden they're asking you to do more, or you have a question about how to fire a client or the client wants to fire you, refund requests, all of these kinds of scenarios, which happen all the time. We are going to start with a contract when we're looking for how to deal with them, how to get out, how to end up on the other side as well as we

Autumn Witt Boyd: can. So

Autumn Witt Boyd: when you are using contracts, when you have a clear contract that is solid and really protects your business, it is going to set you up for a positive relationship. I know I have a lot of creative friends, graphic designers, web designers, who don't like to use contracts because they say I'm creative. I just want to be free. And, you know, flowing and I, I don't want the contract to put a barrier between me and my clients. But what I have found is that in reality, it really does the opposite. Your contract should set clear expectations, not just for you, but also for the other side, whether that's the client or a contract or someone you're collaborating with. That is the beautiful thing about a contract. It is just putting into writing in a very clear and easy to understand way. Hopefully what you have already talked about.

Autumn Witt Boyd: It should, you know, have things about payment. It should have things about what, what each person is going to do, what the responsibilities are. Who's going to own any intellectual property that you're creating. If one of you does want to end the relationship, it's going to cover all of that in a very clear, drama free way so that if something does go wrong and one of you wants to make a change or something unexpected happens, you know, we can't cover everything in a contract. We try, but, you know, contract would be a hundred pages. And for most of us that just doesn't make sense. We try to include what's important, what we think could happen. And then, you know, if the unexpected comes up, we use that as our starting point. So it's really important that your contract is easy to understand for both you, if you have questions later, or if you're having to try and enforce it, lay down the law. It should be easy for you to understand.

Autumn Witt Boyd: It should also be easy for the other side to understand. If it's full of a bunch of legalese and wherefores and hereto, and, you know, all of these legally worded, legally used words that you don't understand, or it's so complicated with, you know, a million semi-colons and long sentences. It's just not helpful. Your contract should be very easy to refer back to. I like to say, I don't know if any of you watch judge Judy. But I like to say, you know, could you take your contract to judge Judy and could she understand it? Like not knowing anything about your industry, you know, she's seen all kinds of different things all day long. Could she understand what you intended? That's how clear it should be. All right. And I really, you know, I am not a bulldog attorney.

Autumn Witt Boyd: I am one of those, you get more bees with honey, that's typically my approach. And I really think that the best contracts are fair to both sides that, coming in with a contract that's really weighted towards you as the service provider, or really weighted towards the client or the, you know, a vendor or another person that you might be collaborating on. I just think that sets you up for problems later on with, you know, people feeling like things aren't fair, people feeling like they're being taken advantage of, especially if you didn't go through the contract really clearly and talk about it and make sure you agreed to everything. If someone looks at it later and they find something that surprises them, or that feels bad, we don't want that. We want the contract to be fair to both sides, and we want it to, you know, be again, it should just say everything that you've already talked about.

Autumn Witt Boyd: And so if during your sales call or during your conversations with new clients or customers or contractors, you know, you're not going to be unfair and a jerk, hopefully. So your contract should be the same way. And again, your contract should include the same things that you talked about in your sales page or promotions or any other, you know, if you had a call with the client, it should be consistent. It should really just be putting into writing the things you've already talked about. So we love surprises in life, but with contracts, we don't want any bad surprises. All right. I hope that I have drilled in that if you come away from this workshop with nothing else, I want you to understand how important contracts are and take a look at your business and realize, you know, am I using contracts where I should be, if I'm not, are there some holes I need to fill and start to work on that.

Autumn Witt Boyd: And if you have been using contracts, but maybe haven't looked at them in a while, it might be time for a review and a refresh. All right. So now let's get to some fun stuff. So what is a copyright? It protects original works of authorship. That's a quote from the copyright act. What we think about mostly with copyright are the things I've listed here. So creative works, photos, music, books, movies, artwork, like what I've got behind me, software. Any other kind of creative works. But in a business, it also is going to protect some things you might not think about. So think about if you're writing a blog post, that's protected by copyright. If you're doing a podcast episode, that's protected by copyright. If you're doing a training like this one, this video is protected by copyright. If you have, you know, worksheets that you use with your clients, or as part of your process of, or, you know, standard operating procedures or guides, anything that basically, if it's out of your brain and onto a piece of paper or a computer file, it could be, if it's creative, it could be protected by copyright.

Autumn Witt Boyd: So the trick is, and I get a lot of questions about this. Copyright does not protect facts or ideas. It protects the way those facts or ideas are expressed. So I have a lot of clients come to me wanting to protect a system or, the way they do things or, you know, I have this brilliant, five step process that I take all my clients through to go from, you know, being overweight and tired to full of energy. We cannot protect that system or that process with copyright. There may be other ways. We'll talk about those in a second. But if you have written down that process, that would be protectable. If you have worksheets that help people go through that process, that's protectable. If you have videos or audio, any, any kind of the parts and pieces, if you think about, how you actually are helping them, all of that stuff is going to be protectable.

Autumn Witt Boyd: Now, what do you get with a copyright? It is, we call it, we call it a bundle of rights. You get lots of different rights. I'm probably going to miss one. I didn't list them all here, but it's all the things you would think about. It's the right to copy. It's the right to distribute, the right to let other people use or not use your copyright. So it's an exclusive, right? You get to control it. You have the right to prepare what are called derivative works. So those are works based on your original work. The right to publicly perform. So if it's music or a play or a movie, you know, those things are protected by copyright. So, you know, think about, it's just basically all the ways that you can use or exploit or make money from a work. The copyright owner gets to control all of that. And then as we're going through this use without permission, we call that infringement. That's our legal, that's our little bit of legalese. I try and keep the legalese out of it, but that is some legalese that's important.

Autumn Witt Boyd: So how are copyrights, trademarks and patents different? So copyright, as we just discussed, protects creative work., Trademarks are going to protect things that identify a brand or a company or a product. So logos, slogans, words, think about like a company name. You know, Nike is a great example of this. The word Nike is a protected trademark. The Nike swoosh symbol is a protected trademark, because when you see that you think Nike, you don't have to see the word Nike, if you see the swoosh you associated with that brand, McDonald's is another great example. So both the word McDonald's, and, you know, the golden arches, that M, very iconic, when you see that you immediately know what you're getting, that's the purpose of trademark law. It's to help customers. It's not really to help businesses, although businesses get the benefit. But it's to help customers make sure that they're getting what they're looking for.

Autumn Witt Boyd: And you do that by having a recognizable brand. So it can protect the sale of services or products, both, both, physical items and services are protected under trademark law. And the trick here is some things are protected by both copyright and trademark. So one of my favorite examples of this is Mickey Mouse. The Disney Company owns the copyright in that character. It is a creative drawing. But Mickey Mouse also symbolizes the Disney Company. And so when you see Mickey Mouse, you think of the Disney brand. So it is also registered as a trademark. So there are some things there's some overlap when we think of, you know, creative type logos and things like that. But most things are gonna fall into one or the other. If you think about things that are short phrases or words, single words, those are going to be too short, generally, to be protected by copyright.

Autumn Witt Boyd: You're probably looking at trademark for that. And then patents and I am not a patent attorney. You have to go to, you have to have a science or a technical background. And I do not. I was a journalism and English major in college. But patents protect inventions. So think about a new way of doing things. Inventions, plants, processes, and some manufacturer designs. There are, there's a little bit of overlap between patent, design patents and copyrights, because it protects certain design elements, but I'm not going to get into that. So just know patents, if you are thinking like I do have this process, and I would like to protect it, you may be able to do that under patent law. You will need to talk to a patent attorney and it is not me.

Autumn Witt Boyd: Okay.

Autumn Witt Boyd: So how can I copyright my work? I have great news for you. You've probably already heard this. You have automatic protection once the work is out of your brain. So it can't just be an idea. Once it is out of your brain and into any tangible medium of expression, it has to be fixed. So that could be a computer file. It could be a piece of paper. It could be you know, a painting. It could be, you know, anything that either you can touch or see., But it can't just be in your brain. So that protection is automatic. You have all of those rights that bundle of rights. We sometimes talk about it as like a bundle of sticks or bundle of pens. That's what I had on my desk. You have that whole bundle of rights immediately. As soon as it is on paper, you don't have to do a thing for it to be protected.

Autumn Witt Boyd: Now, the trick is that registration, it's not required with the us copyright office, but it is going to provide you a lot of benefits and extra protection. So the biggest benefit, and this changed a couple of years ago. So if you've looked at this before, maybe talked with an attorney or read some things, this changed pretty recently. In order to bring a lawsuit, so if you find out that someone has copied your blog post, or someone has ripped off a song or a painting or a photo, in order to sue them for copyright infringement, make them stop, make them pay you money, you have to have a copyright registration. You have to have that before you can go to court. So as a practical matter, if you are wanting to protect your work, if you have something that's really vital to your business, that's important to you that you're making money from, you are going to probably want to register that copyright,

Autumn Witt Boyd: if you think you might ever want to try and enforce it. If you're not, if it's not registered, sometimes people say it's like a right, without a remedy. Like you have this, right, but you can't do anything with it. You can't actually take much action against the person who's using your work without permission. You're also gonna get better damages, more money. If you have to file a lawsuit and you can also have your attorney's fees paid for by the other side, if you register early. So those are kind of enticements. The copyright office wants to encourage you to register your works. The good news is the registration is not super expensive. Actually the registration fees have gone up. I need to update this slide. I think they're about $65 now for most works, but it's still not very expensive. It is a complex application.

Autumn Witt Boyd: You may want to work with a lawyer to make sure it's filled out correctly, but it is fairly user-friendly. If you mess up, as long as you weren't trying to defraud the copyright office, like lying on purpose, generally you are going to be okay. I would much rather that you register your copyright to yourself than, you know, and maybe mess up a little bit than not do it at all, because you can't afford to work with an attorney. All right. I get a lot of questions about fair use. So what is fair use? So this is actually in the copyright act. It's in the law. It is not infringement if you fall into this category. And basically what this means you are using someone else's work in a new work or in a new way. So there's, here's some examples that are in the copyright act, but it's not limited to these, these aren't the only things.

Autumn Witt Boyd: These are just examples. So criticism, like if you think of like a book review or a music review, and you need to play a little bit of the song, or you need to excerpt a little bit of the book in order to, you know, talk about it or to give a flavor of it. Commentary, same thing. News reporting. If you, you know, need to use an image in order to talk about an event. Teaching, including multiple copies for classroom use, there's lots of rules around that. It's not a carte blanche. Or research. So those are examples. But what I will tell you is this is a super, super great area. And I generally do not encourage my clients to rely on fair use if they're using someone else's work, because it is such a gray area. And I have seen, you know, two judges, well, let me tell you, here's how this plays out.

Autumn Witt Boyd: It is a defense. It is not just nothing ever goes wrong. So what happens is you'll get a cease and desist letter or you'll get sued. And then you have to go to court and try and prove that your use was, falls within this exception. So it's not like you're not going to get sued at all. It's very expensive. You still have to hire a lawyer to help you. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal fees, minimum. It's in federal court. And they're going to weigh all these different factors. It's very time-intensive. So it's a risk. It is a risk to rely on fair use. So if you're a big company and you have consulted with your lawyer and you, you have gone through all the analysis and you feel good that, you, your use is fair, fine. And you've got the money in the bank to defend yourself if you get sued, fine.

Autumn Witt Boyd: But if you are a small business, like most of my clients, even a big business, I mean, even a seven or eight figure business cannot afford a million dollars in legal fees in a single year. So I'm not going to get into all the details of fair use just to tell you it's out there. It is risky. I don't recommend relying on it. I will tell you, so here here's the alternative before I move on quickly. What I do recommend is that you, if you want to use someone else's work, someone's photo music, whatever, that you just ask them. That you create your own stuff as much as you can and ask for permission. And if you can't get permission or you can't find the owner, then don't use it. It's just, it's very risky. It could cost you. I mean, copyright act damages for a single infringing, a single work, if it was registered early and they get the maximum damages, $150,000 per work. So let's say you use four photos. I mean, that's four times 150,000 and I not good at math, but I know that's a lot of money. So I highly encourage you to get permission or use something else.

Autumn Witt Boyd: Okay.

Autumn Witt Boyd: Look at the flip side. What if someone else uses your work? What if we have a copycat situation? Here are a couple of best practices. First take a deep breath. This is not on the slide. I've had a ton of these issues come in lately and it can be really emotional. It feels like someone stolen your baby, and I totally get that. I've had my work copied. It is not a good feeling. So start, take a deep breath and then get, gather your evidence. So again, if you had to go to judge Judy and show her that someone copied your work, how would you prove it? You want to have that evidence in your files before you reach out, because it might disappear later and then they might start using it again. And you wish you will wish you had it.

Autumn Witt Boyd: So then I suggest, usually, you know, this may vary, but generally I think reaching out. They may not know what yours, or they may not know that they did anything wrong. I think there's a lot of confusion now with people thinking, Oh, if it's posted on social media, I can use it. That is not true. So maybe a gentle, you know, Hey, I noticed you use my work. You know, I'd really appreciate if you take it down, or I really appreciate if you give me credit or link to my page or whatever, whatever you want them to do. And I like to think of this as kind of a ladder. So we start out nice. And then maybe we get a little more serious, a cease and desist letter, like a formal line in the sand, and you need to stop doing this or else. You know, I will take, I will take other action. There is something called the digital millennium copyright act. Short name is DMCA. And there's a take-down procedure. This is if it's hosted on another, another platform like Facebook or YouTube, you can also send it to their website host. It does not go to the actual person who has posted it. It goes to the company that's kind of hosting the content. And then last resort, as I mentioned, is a lawsuit in federal court. You gotta have a registration first though.

Autumn Witt Boyd: All right. So this is a little more in detail of what I mentioned before. How can I use other people's stuff the right way? So number one, create your own stuff. And number two, get permission. If you can't find the owner, I recommend not using it. There are a lot of works out there that it's just hard. You know, they're old, or you do the research and you just can't figure out who created it. I don't recommend using that stuff because copyright infringement is what we call strict liability and strict is strict. So it means whether you knew you were doing anything wrong or not, whether you, you know, did a search and you tried your best, or you reached out, but nobody responded. Doesn't matter. You are on the hook. You can be sued and held liable and forced to pay money. Even if you try to do all the right things, if you do not have permission in writing, it is dangerous to use someone else's stuff.

Autumn Witt Boyd: Giving credit is not good enough. I think this in, in this internet and social media age, we think, well, I, you know, I give credit. I said, where I got it, that is not good enough. It is always better to ask permission. Relying on fair use, as I mentioned is very risky. I won't go into that again. Some ideas here, creative commons license. These are often free to use, but read them carefully because some of them do have requirements about what's called attribution. So like tell it, it's like giving credit, telling people where you found it, listing the name. And if you don't follow those to a T you're now infringing someone's copyright. So just kind of, buyer beware there. And then I get questions about licensed fabric. Like, what can I do? The thing about licensed fabric is if you are like creating bedspreads or, you know, apparel or any kind of thing that you buy fabric that has like an NFL team logo on it or characters, those are typically licensed from the copyright holder.

Autumn Witt Boyd: So, the first sale doctrine in copyright means that if I buy a copyrighted work, I'm looking around, okay. So like the painting behind me, if I buy the painting, that's the first sale. I buy it from the artist. The artist, the copyright owner only gets to control that first sale. I, as the new owner of the physical piece can sell it to somebody else, but I don't actually own the copyrights. So you can't like take pictures or make copies. I can't do all those things in that bundle of rights. My bundle of rights. I can't create a different version of it. But so that's what that first sale doctrine means. That is a copyright concept. It is not a trademark concept. So I think there's a lot of confusion here with fabric and people think, or any kind of licensed goods. People think, Oh, well, I bought it so I can do whatever I want with it.

Autumn Witt Boyd: And then your Etsy shop gets shut down because you had, you know, an NFL name, team name in your listing. Well, the reason is trademark law does not have a first sale doctrine because trademark law is not about controlling the use of an image. It's about the brand. And so it's confusing to consumers who are looking for official like Tennessee Titans apparel, and they find your Etsy listing. You're not associated with the Tennessee Titans. You don't have a license. So that was a lot to say, if you are dealing with that, just be careful. You will get shut down. You will get reported and it can be a big problem.

Autumn Witt Boyd: All right. Last thing we're going to talk about is do I need to form a company? Do I need an LLC or a corporation? What we call a corporate entity? So there's two things to think about here. Only one of which I really know about. So the first thing, this is the legal side is liability protection. What that means in non-legal legalese is what can you get sued for? So if something goes terribly wrong in your business, and someone wants to sue you, what does that look like? What are, what are your risks? Liability is just basically a risk. So what an LLC or corporation does is I like to say it kind of builds a fence around your business. So if something goes wrong inside my business, it's inside the fence. Someone can sue the business, the corporation, or the LLC, and they can take or seize or, you know, make you pay anything that's in the business.

Autumn Witt Boyd: So if you have a business bank account, if you have a business vehicle, if you have a business, like the office that I'm sitting in, we own. If you've got equipment or other things, they can take all of that. They can take all the stuff from the, so let's say you breach a contract or someone comes to your office and falls down and gets hurt. And they sue you. What they cannot get if you have that LLC or corporation, and you're doing it the right way, they cannot get things that are outside of this fence, like your personal bank account, your personal house or car. All that stuff is protected. So they can still get at the things in the business, but they can't get at your personal assets. So that's going to limit your exposure, especially if you do have significant assets, if you're independently wealthy or you have, you know, a retirement account or you're, you know, making good money at a day job still, that can be seized.

Autumn Witt Boyd: Your wages can be garnished. If something goes wrong and you get sued for it and you don't have that protection. So when we think about, do I need it, do I need that protection? Not everybody maybe needs that protection. But that's the way to think about it is what can go wrong in my business. There's different risks in every business. I love to give this example. I live in beautiful Chattanooga, Tennessee, and we have mountains here, little mountains, but they're mountains. And, there's a skydiving facility nearby. So if you are the business that runs that skydiving facility, these people are literally jumping off of mountains, you know, with the skydiving thing. That's pretty high risk. Like if something goes wrong, someone dies. That's a very, very substantial risk with a lot of money. And so you would definitely want that protection.

Autumn Witt Boyd: Oh my goodness. You don't want them coming after all of your other assets. At the other end of the spectrum would be my friend who is a web designer and works from her home office. And, you know, the worst thing that really could go wrong for her is she uses someone else's content with the wrong way. She gets sued for copyright infringement, or maybe a client is unhappy with her and they, you know, sue her for breach of contract. But the risks are really very low and no one's going to get hurt in what she's doing. Maybe she'll get carpal tunnel, but, you know, it's just her, she's a sole proprietor, single person, very, very low risk. And so when we look at that spectrum, I want you to think about where do you fall on that spectrum of risk? Are you the skydiving company?

Autumn Witt Boyd: Are you, you know, I've put you kind of yoga teachers, anybody doing physical activity or diet or nutrition health, all of that stuff kind of is towards the skydiving end of the spectrum. And all of my creatives are more kind of over here, very low risk. Once your company grows, this analysis may change. That's something to kind of keep in mind. Maybe you think about it once or twice a year. But that is what an LLC or corporation is going to do for you. And that is how I would encourage you to think about it. Now there are costs to setting up an LLC or a corporation. I will tell you, as a sole proprietor, this is different in every single state. So, in Tennessee, for example, you don't have to do anything to be a sole proprietor.

Autumn Witt Boyd: You just are one, if you are in business in other States, you have to actually register. So there may be a cost to even being a sole proprietor in other States. But if you are a sole proprietor, so you don't have that corporate structure, you don't have that fence. So if something goes wrong in the business, they're coming after you and they're coming after everything you've got. So that's really the benefit. Think about whether, whether that makes sense, whether the cost is worth it. The costs are different in every state. Again, I'm in Tennessee. For my LLC it's about $300 a year. In California, it's over a thousand dollars a year. So, you know, that's going to be a different analysis. The second thing to think about is there may be tax advantages to having an LLC or a corporation. Talk to your accountant about that.

Autumn Witt Boyd: I am not a tax attorney, but I will just kind of flag that for you. As your, especially as your income grows, as your profits are higher, there may be some advantages to having that corporate entity under the tax code. And I will mention insurance is kind of the flip side of forming an LLC or corporation. So it does something similar, but in a different way. It protects you, if something goes wrong by actually paying the claim. So somebody slips and falls at my office on the steps, that insurance would pay their claim. I might still get sued, either way. The LLC will keep them from taking my personal money, but I might still have to pay all those medical bills out of my business accounts. The insurance will actually pay those medical bills. But the insurance is not going to protect my personal asset.,

Autumn Witt Boyd: if say their medical bills are a million dollars. My insurance coverage is a hundred thousand, you know, then now I've got to cover that difference if I don't have that LLC or corporation to protect me. But general liability insurance is something to think about, especially if you do identify some risks in your business that you might want to make sure you're addressing. Two times that I would say as, and these are, as you grow, these are not going to be right away, but two times to really consider forming an LLC or corporation and, or looking at insurance would be when you hire real employees, they're not just contractors, but real employees. Now you've got all kinds of additional risk from having to comply with all of those employment laws. They may be coming to your office. They're just, it opens up a new Pandora's box.

Autumn Witt Boyd: So number one is employees. Number two is a physical location. So like the office I'm standing in, you know, a lot of us, especially during pandemic are just working from home. So, nobody's coming to visit us. We're doing everything remotely, whether we were before or not. Which is wonderful, so very low risk. But if you do have a physical location, even if you're just going to a co-working space, you still may be on the hook for someone comes to see you and is injured or something goes wrong. All right, I'm going to wrap up there. If you have questions, I have three things that you can do. Number one is purchase the Side Hustle Power Pack.

: My prep to sale, Prep To Scale fast track is included, and that is, it was, we did it as a five day challenge, but we packaged it all up and put it into an online course platform. In about an hour, hour and a half

Autumn Witt Boyd: you're going to be able to work through that. Take a look at all the different parts of your business and see where there might be legal holes and get next steps on filling them. So it kind of helps you evaluate what you actually need legally, how to prioritize it, figure out what you should do now, what can maybe wait until later. So that is super valuable. Number two idea, totally free, listen to the Legal Roadmap podcast. I've got over 170 episodes all about all the things we talked about in much, much more detail. And then you can also join our Legal Roadmap, Facebook group, which is where people post questions. Other entrepreneurs chime in. The other attorneys and I will pop in there a couple of times a week and try and answer questions and be helpful also. So that is a great resource for you as well. It has been my pleasure to share with you Legal For Online and Creative Businesses. And I hope to stay in touch

Speaker 4: With you.