Hoover Area General Law Blog

Opening a business is an exciting time for entrepreneurs. Your dream of being your own boss is finally coming true. You have spent hours creating a business plan along with your mission and company goals and you are almost ready to take the next step: making your company a legal entity with the ability to operate in Shelby County. Part of starting a company includes selecting a business structure for your business.

The type of legal entity you choose for your company can have lasting affects on how you run your business. Here are a few things to consider before you settle on a business formation.

For many married people in Alabama, Social Security benefits are an important asset. Even when a spouse has little or no income of their own, they may still collect up to half of their significant other's benefits if they are eligible to receive payouts. But when a marriage ends, there's understandable concern about what might happen with such benefits.

If a marriage lasted for 10 years or more, a former spouse still unmarried and eligible for Social Security benefits may be able to collect on their ex's record, provided he or she is also entitled to benefits. Even if the other spouse has remarried, the former spouse may still collect up to half of their ex's full benefits. Payouts claimed before full retirement age, however, will be reduced accordingly. Also, collection when an eligible ex-spouse has not yet applied for benefits may be possible if it's been two or more years since the divorce.

Alabama is not a community property state, so when couples get a divorce there, each spouse is entitled to an equitable but not necessarily equal share of marital assets. How to determine what is equitable can be difficult when one spouse was the breadwinner and the other stayed home to raise children. While it may be fairly straightforward to assess the earnings of the spouse who has worked outside the home over the years, it can be more difficult to put a value on the other spouse's contributions.

Usually, the spouse who stays home is the woman. More than one-fourth of mothers in the United States do, and one in every 10 has a master's degree or higher. Studies have looked at how this value might be assigned and how people think it should be assessed. In one study, participants read a basic scenario with a stay-at-home mother but different variations. Overall, women tended to think the mother should be awarded more in a divorce. Men tended to award the mother more when she had a higher educational attainment.

The rise in the use of facial recognition technology and the lack of standards or regulation around its use means that people in Alabama and throughout the country who have been convicted of crimes could be tracked in certain public places. Even people who are merely suspected of shoplifting without being charged could be barred from stores that chose to do so. The ban could extend far beyond the initial store and could include all the stores in the network.

One of the major issues with facial recognition technology is that there is not a single standard of accuracy. Therefore, while it might be expected that law enforcement would use more accurate technology than what is in casual commercial use, this is not necessarily the case.