I've built the kind of business you're running.

The direct answer first

You probably landed here because you're forming a Mississippi LLC, signing a commercial lease, or trying to figure out whether your handshake business partnership needs an operating agreement before it eats you. Short answers: the LLC costs $50 in state filing fees plus my $750 fee, and yes you can do it yourself but most people shouldn't; the lease has at least three landmines in the maintenance and assignment clauses that nobody catches without a redline; and yes, the partnership needs the OA last year.

The rest of this page walks through how I actually handle these matters, what's in the price, and the situations where you genuinely don't need me. I publish all of this because the work isn't secret — it's just unfamiliar.

Forming a Mississippi LLC

Mississippi's LLC statute lives at Miss. Code Ann. § 79-29-101 through § 79-29-1310. The Secretary of State runs the filing portal at sos.ms.gov. The Certificate of Formation itself is a one-page document with maybe six fields: name, registered agent, principal office, organizer, effective date, and signature. The filing fee is $50. Turnaround is usually 24–72 hours.

The Certificate is the easy part. The pieces that actually determine whether your LLC works as designed are:

• The operating agreement, which Mississippi doesn't require you to have but every bank, investor, and partner is going to ask for the moment things get real.
• The EIN, which you pull from the IRS directly for free at irs.gov — never pay one of the upsell sites $79 for this, they are literally typing the same form you would type.
• The election decisions: default LLC tax treatment versus S-corp election (Form 2553) versus C-corp election. This is the one that costs people the most money when they get it wrong.
• Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) reporting under the Corporate Transparency Act, which is currently in flux. As of this writing, domestic reporting companies are not required to file. Read the current FinCEN guidance before you assume anything.

What's in the $750 single-member package

• Name availability check on the SOS database.
• Certificate of Formation drafted and filed.
• EIN obtained from the IRS.
• A real operating agreement — not the three-page template the legal-tech sites sell, but a 12–18 page document that covers capital contributions, distributions, member buyout, deadlock, death/incapacity, and dissolution.
• Initial member resolutions, banking resolution, and a corporate-record binder you can hand a bank or an investor.
• A 30-minute call to walk through the operating agreement and explain what each clause actually does.

Multi-member LLC + custom operating agreement — $1,500

The single-member OA is largely off-the-rack because there's no one to fight with. The moment you have a second member, the OA becomes the most important document in your business. The $1,500 fee buys a custom OA that addresses, at minimum:

• Capital structure. Initial contributions, additional capital calls, dilution mechanics, and what happens when one member can't or won't fund.
• Distributions. Distinguishing tax distributions (mandatory, pro-rata, based on highest-tax-bracket member) from discretionary distributions.
• Management. Member-managed vs. manager-managed, voting thresholds, what requires unanimity, what requires a majority.
• Transfer restrictions. Rights of first refusal, tag-along, drag-along, and a real buyout formula triggered by death, disability, divorce, or termination.
• Deadlock. Texas shoot-out, Russian roulette, or third-party valuation — pick one before you need it.

Commercial leases

I've signed both sides of a lot of these. The three clauses people lose on are (1) the operating-expense pass-through and the cap (or absence of a cap), (2) the assignment and subletting clause, and (3) the relocation clause. Landlords' standard forms in Memphis, Oxford, and Tupelo are uniformly tenant-hostile on all three. A 1-hour redline session almost always pays for itself within twelve months of occupancy.

My fee for a full tenant-side review and markup is $850 flat. That includes the redlined document and a 1-hour call. Negotiating the markup with the landlord's lawyer is separate and quoted based on how much fight you want to put up.

Trademark filing

$950 plus the USPTO filing fees (currently $350/class for TEAS Standard). I'll do the clearance search, draft the application, file it, and respond to the first non-substantive office action. If we get a substantive 2(d) likelihood-of-confusion refusal, that's a separate engagement.

TCB Counsel — $500/month

This is the wedge product for small business owners and operators. It gives you unlimited 30-minute calls, contract review for anything under ten pages, a monthly check-in, and 20% off any other flat fee. Most clients use it three or four times a month. The first time you avoid signing something dumb, it has paid for the year.

No annual contract. Cancel any time. Suited for someone running a restaurant, a small construction firm, an e-commerce business, a real-estate LLC, or a professional practice that needs occasional legal cover without the open-ended billing.

When you don't need me

If you're a single-member LLC with no partners, no employees, no physical lease, no investors, and a simple revenue model — Etsy shop, freelance consulting, single-author Substack — you can do the entire formation yourself in an afternoon. I'd rather you read my guide and come back when you grow into something that genuinely needs a lawyer than spend $750 on something you could have done for $50.