Your business group workshop businesses have decided to merge into one business with the other business groups. That single business will offer multiple products and/or services in one building under one roof.

Before this merger, your businesses purchase buildings roughly the same size next to each other on a Central Avenue in Winter Haven with roughly equal parking lots in the back of each. Each building and parking lot purchased is titled to each of the owners of the business as tenants-in-common and as you paid cash, the properties are owned free and clear.

While the construction work is going on, you hold a meeting to come up with a catchy name for your new combined business for a planned TV, billboard and radio advertising campaign. You agree with using the following name for your new, combined business, with the phrase, ARE US, attached at the end, with the R backwards. You hire a computer geek to design a web site using as the domain name the new name of your business, including ARE US in the name.

As the reconstruction work nears completion, however, an attorney from Polk County informs you that the County intends to take the parking lots for use by a new county government building. He offers you $225,000 for the lot; however, this parking lot parcel was recently appraised at $500,000.00. You reject Polk Countys offer and their attorney promises to pursue legal proceedings to take the parking lot from you.

The computer geek employed by you has designed a computer accounting software program perfect for the new, combined business.

1. What type or form of business organization would you recommend to your fellow business owners to form for your new combined business? Explain why you would use this form of business organization and how you would go about forming it.

2. If any of your owners or members of your new, combined business dies, who would own his or her share of the building and lot which is now owned by each of you as tenants in common?

3. What concern does your lawyer express about the name selected for your new business and setting up the web site using that name?

4. What legal doctrine is Polk County attempting to apply to obtain your parking lot? Under what amendment of the US Constitution does it arise? What is the proceeding called that they are threatening to bring. In what Florida court would it be brought? How would just compensation be decided?

5. What type of intellectual property would the software program be considered and what could you do to protect it?