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TRANSCRIPT

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[Sunny Smith]: Michael H. Cohen is the founder of Cohen Healthcare Law Group.

He’s a former professor at Harvard medical school and a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The author of over a hundred articles in law reviews and peer reviewed journals, as well as six books, including four published by an academic presses like Johns Hopkins University Press. Michael’s a thought leader who pioneers legal strategies and solutions for clients in traditional and emerging health and wellness markets. In doing so, he advises many physician clients in a variety of businesses and practices. Michael and his attorney team have a wide range of knowledge and he’s glad to have this chance to share some of it with us today.

[Sunny Smith]: You’re saying form and entity, form a legal entity…

[Michael H. Cohen]: Yeah, form a legal entity, you have to pick the right entity. There’s some considerations there, but form something. Now you can have other people in it. So that’s number one. I’m just going, we have checklists, but I’m going more with the flow here, intuitively because I believe in that.

Number one, form an entity. Number two, you’ll probably have people in it, but be thoughtful about that. That’s a whole subject in itself. Who you have in it? People are just way too casual with it.

[Sunny Smith]: Yeah. Most people here, I think will be solopreneurs, but you’re cautioning against forming, say a partnership or something…

[Michael H. Cohen]: Well, you don’t want a partnership because partners are responsible for one another’s actions. One another’s debts. One another contracts, what the other partner does, you’re on the hook for it.

But people give away shares way too easily. “Oh, I can’t pay my graphic designer. It’s $1,000.” Have some shares, great. The guy who was in Apple, the third shareholder, and he sold because he didn’t think the business was going to succeed. I mean, that would have been, I don’t know, so much money these days, but you want to be careful.

Yes, you want to protect your intellectual property, that’s another thing. You want to do a trademark search, make sure nobody else owns Empowering Physicians out there. Otherwise, welcome to business, here’s the demand letter from our attorney. You violated a trademark law. It’s 30 something thousand dollars a claim. Welcome to the business world, now, lawyer up.