A joint venture lets two businesses chase an opportunity neither could win alone — shared costs, shared strengths, shared upside.
It also means sharing decisions, IP, and risk with a company you don't control. Our JV attorneys structure the deal so the collaboration works — and so your business, customers, and ideas are still fully yours when it ends.
Contractual JV or a new joint entity — the choice drives taxes, liability, and control.
Contributions, governance, profits, and exits — every term negotiated and written.
Who owns what each side brings in — and everything created together.
Contribution-based splits that stay fair when the workload shifts.
Share what the venture needs — without handing over your playbook or customers.
How the venture ends, who keeps what, and what happens to joint assets.
Deadlocks, unequal contribution, and misuse of shared assets — resolved before they sink the venture.
The full agreement — contributions, governance, profits, IP, confidentiality, and exit.
When the venture needs its own LLC or corporation — formed and documented properly.
The other side sent a draft? Know what it really says before you commit.
Lighter-weight collaborations — referral deals, co-marketing, and bid teaming.
Mediation, buyout negotiation, or litigation when a venture goes sideways.
End the venture cleanly — assets divided, obligations settled, relationships intact.
"Let's just split everything 50/50 and see how it goes" is how promising collaborations turn into disputes over money, customers, and who owns what.
Nobody agreed who owns what's created together
You may have formed an accidental partnership — sharing all liability
Customer relationships and data walk out with either side
No exit terms — endings turn into hostage negotiations
IP, customers, and data ownership defined before work starts
Liability contained — each business protected from the other's risks
Decision rights and deadlock mechanisms that keep the venture moving
A pre-agreed ending — renewal, buyout, or clean separation
JV attorneys across all 50 states.
Structure negotiated for your side of the table.
One agreement review or the full venture build-out.
Decades of combined experience structuring business collaborations.
Discuss the deal privately before the other side knows your position.
A partnership is usually an ongoing business owned together; a joint venture is typically two independent businesses collaborating on a specific project or market, for a defined period, while staying separate companies. The danger: collaborate informally and the law may treat you as accidental partners anyway — sharing liability you never signed up for. The JV agreement prevents that.
Not always. A contractual JV (agreement only) is simpler and cheaper for short-term projects. A joint entity (new LLC or corporation) makes sense for longer ventures with shared assets, employees, or serious liability exposure. The right answer depends on scope, duration, and risk — it's usually the first question your attorney resolves.
Whatever the agreement says — and if it says nothing, you're headed for the most expensive kind of IP dispute: joint ownership by default, where neither side can license or sell cleanly. A good JV agreement separates background IP (what each side brought) from foreground IP (what you build together) and states exactly who can use what, during and after the venture.
Through confidentiality, non-solicitation, and data-use clauses written into the JV agreement — defining what's shared, what it may be used for, and what happens to it when the venture ends. Without those terms, the collaboration can become a training program for your next competitor.
With a good agreement: the pre-agreed exit terms kick in — wind-down steps, asset division, IP allocation, and post-venture restrictions. Without one: negotiation, leverage games, and possibly litigation while the opportunity dies. Exit terms are the single most valuable part of a JV agreement, and the part informal deals always skip.
Most JV agreements are flat-fee, scoped after a free consultation — with cost driven by structure (contractual vs. new entity) and complexity. It's a fraction of what either side stands to lose from an ambiguous deal, and far less than one month of a JV dispute. Payment plans are available.
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We co-developed software with a larger company, and their first draft would have given them joint ownership of everything — including tech we'd built years earlier. Our attorney separated background IP from what we created together and negotiated license-back rights. When the venture ended, we walked away with our product intact.
A competitor and I teamed up to bid on a contract too big for either of us. Our attorney structured a teaming agreement covering responsibilities, revenue split, and what happens to the client relationship after. We won the bid, delivered, and both came out ahead — because the awkward questions were answered on paper first.
Our joint venture didn't hit its numbers and both sides wanted out. Because the agreement had wind-down terms — who keeps the inventory, the customer data, the domain — we closed it out in three weeks without a single argument. My previous informal collaboration took a year of fighting to unwind.
We'd been running a revenue-share deal with another company on a handshake. My attorney pointed out we'd likely formed a legal partnership without knowing it — meaning their debts could become ours. He restructured it as a proper contractual JV with liability walls. That consultation may have saved my company.
