William A. Price, Attorney at Law
There are three different sets of rules and institutions/persons defined under the JOBS Act, and rules are in place for two out of three. These are: (a) Persons and organizations interested in private placement of securities. Rule 506 has been amended to allow public announcement of such opportunities, which means that if you limit investments…
The US Environmental Protection Agency issued rules December 30, 2013 approving the American Society for Testing and Measurement (ASTM) E1527-13 standard practice for Phase I environmental site assessments. This is an “all appropriate inquiries” standard, which defines and limits what types of site conditions require inquiry, allows parties to rely on agency letters indicating they…
Greenhouse gases, which are emitted by every form of internal combustion engine, are at issue in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has argued that since they regulated greenhouse gases in mobile source regulations, upheld in an earlier case, they must also regulate…
Mary K. Ludgin, PhD, of Heitman Financial, gave an excellent presentation of economic forecasts for US property markets at the February 20, 2014 meeting of the CCIM Institute. She predicted accelerating job growth in 2014, though that growth rate will vary widely by city, with Texas cities among the highest and Chicago, alas, among the…
The Illinois Appellate Court allowed Section 10-10 of the Illinois LLC Act, which eliminates liability for members and managers based solely on their status as members or managers, to protect a sole owner and manager of an Illinois LLC where condominium buyers had flooding in their unit, purchased after they received a report and representations…
Congress let two significant small business tax breaks expire at the end of 2013. These were: — The 100% exclusion from capital gains of sales of “qualified small business” stock. A 50% exclusion remains, and the rest of the gain gets ordinary capital gains tax treatment. See http://www.martindale.com/investments-law/article_Foley-Hoag-LLP_2041816.htm for details. — Equipment costs of up to…
Bill Strauss, Senior Economist and Economic Adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, gave a great talk to the Midwest Business Brokers and Intermediaries on January 31, 2014. He was kind enough to share his slides with the group, for publication on the MBBI website and for their general use (with proper credit to…
Noncompetes come up in several business contexts. A few examples: Introductions to people or deals: Here, a “Noncompete/Noncircumvent” agreement is usual, with both sides promising not to do a deal with other people they introduce to each other, or to do a deal without the other’s permission, and not to use information they receive…
“Patent trolls” take advantage of the relatively easy process for getting a “patent” for inventions in the USA (almost 303,000 issued in 2013, according to the US Patent and Trademark Office, see http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.htm) and the frequently incomprehensible language of “claims” in the issued patents to suggest that their (often never commercialized) old inventions were the…
If a business transaction could result in foreign control of a US business, the US government has the power to review and take action if national security so requires. There is a process for voluntary pre-transaction submissions to the US government which is highly recommended, to avoid possible post-merger problems. This process involves a unit…