As we close the year 2022, TEIL, using retrospective vision, has sought to characterize the most important legal changes in business that we have seen this year. TEIL saw the most significant changes in structuring of businesses or the downfall. From our view, there seems to be a sudden downfall in proper legal structuring and we think this is because of the amazing rise among entrepreneurs across the globe that do not have to do business the “Old Fashioned Way.”. Today, thousands of business owners and entrepreneurs are venturing into e-commerce. They have been approaching our legal firms in numbers, to know more about both the national and international markets. 

According to the reports by Statista.com, in the Q1 of 2022, approx. 3,47,000 new businesses formed in the United States. This was a decrease, however from Q3 of 2021 where approx. 379,000 new businesses were formed. According to Oberlo, the number of SMEs. increased to 33.2billion, which is a substantive growth, which is approx. 2.2 % increase from 2021. And overall growth between 2017-2022 is approx. 12.2%. Accordingly, 61.7million employees in the USA which is 46.4% is used by the US workforce. 

TEIl Firms also witnessed these same entrepreneurs' additional concerns with the protection of their Intellectual property. It is interesting that the formal structure of the business was not as important as the intellectual property this year. We believe there was more information in the media about intellectual property than there was about proper business structuring. We also find that Amazon and other digital platforms have removed some of the need for formality, not only in business ownership, where you can start a company without some of the formalities. However, you still have to be careful about the risks that you have with your name.

Another trend for us was online innovations by children. Seems that entrepreneurs got younger. Turns out that the statics say that almost 60% of teenagers are interested to open their own start-ups, as per the survey results by Junior Achievement USA. They are learning about entrepreneurship, learning the importance of ‘goodwill’ in business at earlier ages. The influencer world just continued to increase with it becoming a new business category all its own. Influencers along with gamers now show up in the top 10 careers for young people.. 

Although these e-commerce brand trends increased this year, TEIL Firms continued to help several international trade businesses continue to do business the traditional way. They opened subsidiaries in Illinois or in the USA and completed cross-border transactions. We saw one of our clients increase revenue by 50% and another by 400%!  TEIL assisted them  with contracts, business planning compliance and intellectual property issues. The best part of the year was seeing everyone more confident about doing business after Covid-19, no matter how they are doing business. This definitely tells us that in the world of business there is room for everyone.

REFERENCES:

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/771207/quarterly-business-starts-us/#:~:text=Quarterly%20business%20starts%20in%20the%20U.S.%202012%2D2022&text=In%20the%20first%20quarter%20of,379%2C000%20new%20businesses%20were%20formed.

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/03/60percent-of-teens-want-to-launch-businesses-instead-of-working-regular-jobs.html#:~:text=About%2060%25%20of%20teenagers%20are,survey%20from%20Junior%20Achievement%20USA.