What happens when business partners stop getting along, contracts weren’t written properly, or nobody planned for what happens when things go wrong?
On Episode 71 of Legally Exhausted, Abe Ovadia sits down with commercial litigation attorney Arianna Mendez for a conversation about the legal side of owning, growing, and protecting a business.
Arianna shares her family’s story, from her Cuban roots and parents’ journey to the United States to how those experiences shaped her respect for entrepreneurship, property rights, hard work, and the law. She explains how that background eventually led her to a career focused on helping business owners protect what they’ve worked to build.
Abe and Arianna break down some of the problems she regularly encounters in commercial litigation — including partnership disputes, breach of contract, poorly drafted operating agreements, commercial leases, business succession, professional licensing matters, and the costly consequences of waiting until there’s a problem to call an attorney.
They also discuss why starting a business with friends can become complicated when nobody establishes who controls the money, how profits are distributed, who makes major decisions, what happens when someone wants out, and how disagreements will be resolved.