Business & tax attorneys in Lexington & Chapin, SC.

Starting a business right

The entity you choose — LLC, S corporation, partnership — sets your liability protection, your tax treatment, and how cleanly you can bring in partners or investors later. The right answer depends on what you're building and who's building it with you.

Formation done properly is more than a state filing. It's an operating agreement that actually anticipates disagreement, ownership records that will survive due diligence, and a tax election made on purpose rather than by default. We set all of it up, and we explain every choice in plain English.

Contracts & corporate counsel

We serve as outside corporate counsel for small and medium-size businesses across the Midlands — the standing relationship where legal questions get answered before they become legal problems. Leases, vendor and customer agreements, employment matters, commercial real estate: reviewed, negotiated, and drafted by someone who knows your business.

James's background as the SC Department of Revenue's Privacy Officer brings depth in information-technology security law and IT contract review, for businesses whose data — or whose vendors' data practices — carry real risk.

Tax planning

Good tax planning happens before the transaction, not at filing time. With an LL.M. in Taxation from Georgetown and years inside the state's revenue agency, James plans entity structures, transactions, and successions with the tax consequences in full view — federal, state, and local.

That includes coordinating with your CPA. Accountants prepare the returns; we handle the legal structure the returns describe. The businesses best positioned at tax time are the ones where those two conversations happen together.

Tax controversy

When a dispute with a taxing authority can't be avoided, experience on the other side of the table matters. James spent six years as a tax litigation and tax policy attorney at the South Carolina Department of Revenue before entering private practice — he knows how the agency builds its cases because he built them.

He has tried matters to decision before the United States Tax Court and the South Carolina Administrative Law Court, and handles audits, assessments, collections, and appeals at both the state and federal level. Most controversies settle; we prepare every one as if it won't.

Succession & exit

Every business changes hands eventually — to a buyer, a partner, or the next generation. A succession plan decides whether that transfer happens on your terms. Buy/sell agreements, key-person planning, and the estate planning that keeps the company out of probate are all one conversation here, because the same attorney handles both sides of it.