Baton Rouge Legal Blog

Louisiana fans of Aretha Franklin or Prince won't want to follow in their footsteps when it comes to estate planning. Neither had a will despite being worth $80 million and $300 million respectively when they died. Dying without a will means that the government plays a significant role in determining how assets are distributed.

In addition to a will, small business owners should consider creating a succession plan. The plan will decide who gets the company after the current owner dies and how the transfer will take place. A health care directive and financial power of attorney documents should also be included in an estate plan. These documents give a person greater control over the treatment that he or she receives or how money is spent while incapacitated. This is true whether a person is incapacitated on a temporary or a permanent basis.

When you get into a car accident, injury is a common result. Having a car slam into yours can jostle the body immensely, sometimes crushing the body and breaking bones. Accidents that end in injury can be scary and dangerous, which is why it is important to know the possibilities for injury.

If you are injured in a crash, your priority should be your own safety. Motor-vehicle crash injuries require medical attention. These are the most common types of injuries individuals sustain from automobile crashes.

When an entrepreneur thinks about creating a new business in Louisiana, they may be concerned about how to best attract the kind of financing that can help their start-up grow and thrive. There are a number of reasons why new start-ups can have difficulty getting the funding they seek from venture capitalists. In some cases, the process of fundraising itself can hinder the likelihood of success. Someone entering a new business can tailor the process in order to enhance their ability to attract vital funding and support.

In many cases, venture capitalists will want to look at the capitalization table, a document that indicates which people and companies have an ownership stake in the company. Sometimes, the document itself can have inherent problems. For example, it may be outdated, may not show the results of other funding rounds or may have broken models for equity stakes. In other cases, the problems can be more fundamental. For example, early investors may have received significant stakes for relatively small sums. Other concerns can be raised if the founders have made verbal promises of equity stakes that are not reflected in the document.

Louisiana drivers may soon start to notice more roundabouts popping up around the state. That's because traffic safety experts say that one-way, circular intersections can save lives and reduce costs, particularly in rural areas.

For example, North Carolina planners are installing roundabouts in many rural communities in an effort to decrease traffic fatalities. Officials recently constructed a roundabout at one particularly dangerous intersection in Robeson County after drivers kept running the stop sign and causing serious crashes. In 2011, one collision at the intersection took the life of a 21-year-old pregnant woman. The new roundabout cost around $1.2 million to install, but engineers with the North Carolina Department of Transportation estimated it will save the state $2.5 million each year in reduced injury costs.