Naming a new business

[Business Attorney]

I just posted a new article on my Illinois Business Lawyer website with some tips to help someone starting a new business pick a business name. Coming up with a business name is one of the first hurdles any new business owner faces. As we all know, the name can be a very important factor in the success of many businesses.

My article is here: 5 Tips to Help You Name Your New Business :: Illinois Business Attorney (http://www.illinoisbusinessattorney.com/articles/naming-your-new-business.html)

Please add to this thread if there is anything you think I missed! I'll be glad to improve the article if you have suggestions.

[Steve B]

Hi David,

I was thinking you should have some reference to how the business name will work in the electronic world. You also didn't reference verifying that it hasn't already been used by another company.

[Business Attorney]

Hi David,

I was thinking you should have some reference to how the business name will work in the electronic world. You also didn't reference verifying that it hasn't already been used by another company.

Thanks for the comments, Steve. I'll incorporate both your ideas. With respect to the second one, I intend to write a separate article on protecting the name but I agree that making sure you don't have an infringing or unprotectable name should be covered in this article.

A week ago I put up an article Checklist for starting a business in Illinois (http://www.illinoisbusinessattorney.com/articles/checklist-for-starting-a-business-in-illinois.html) and my plan is to have a more complete discussion of each of the topics in that article. The naming article was just the first one. You can see in the checklist the last item is "Protecting your company name"

My primary goal with the series of articles is to be able to direct clients forming a new business to a more complete discussion of the topics I typically cover in person with a new client. I convey a lot of information in a 30 minute or one hour meeting and I am sure they don't remember 20% of it by the time they walk out of our office door. With a lot of new clients, I feel like telling them that they should go read on a book on starting a business or surf around the web (all of this stuff is out there somewhere already). I hope that this will help bridge that gap. When I get it fully flushed out, I may even put it in a single ebook that I can have them download.