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Last Updated: October 21, 2022

15 Minutes to Mastery: Support Small Businesses with Gale LegalForms

As small business owners work to adapt their companies to the changing times, Gale can support their legal needs with Gale LegalForms. In this 15 minute session we review the forms available to entrepreneurs in your community focused on loans and lending, human resources, technology, and landlord and vendor agreements.

Duration: 15 Minutes
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Amber Winters: Okay welcome everyone let's go ahead and get started today is one of our 15 minutes to mastery sessions many, this is a 15 minute session.

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Amber Winters: focused specifically today on supporting small businesses with gail legal forums, my name is amber winters I am a training consultant here at gail and i'm really excited to have you all here today.

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Amber Winters: let's go ahead and jump in just with a quick agenda, so I do briefly want to mention some of the helpful categories you're going to find within legal forms so as you have small business owners or.

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Amber Winters: potential entrepreneurs coming into your library asking you for information, some categories, you may think about if you're forwarding them along to gail legal forms will take a look at those.

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Amber Winters: we're going to spend the majority of our 15 minutes, though actually within the resource, so we can see where exactly all of those great bits of information are found, and how your patrons can access those.

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Amber Winters: At the very end of the session is where will answer all questions and i'll give you a bit of contact information so.

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Amber Winters: If you do have questions you can type them into the Q amp a at any time, but again, they will be saved until the very end of the session, to make sure we get through all of our content today.

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Amber Winters: So first one to point out, for different categories that may be really helpful for your patrons coming in asking for assistance.

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Amber Winters: So if you ever have some coming in asking about finances, maybe they're currently established as a small business, but really need help with bookkeeping.

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Amber Winters: We have great checklists spreadsheets and worksheets already built into gail legal forms that can help them kind of direct them into the right way.

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Amber Winters: of doing things to make sure they are profitable and they're doing things as easy as possible with their small business.

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Amber Winters: In addition to that, we have great information on business operations so administrative practices.

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Amber Winters: After starting to run advertising campaign we have great templates for that as well as human resource information so if this is a new small business looking to kind of build that human resource department.

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Amber Winters: oftentimes that can be difficult, we have quite a bit of information within Guild legal forums, that they can pull forward to us.

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Amber Winters: Of course, as you would expect within Gil legal forums, we have a specific section for a small business legal forums.

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Amber Winters: So things like applying for copyrights patents and trademarks trademarks those may be helpful for entrepreneurs who haven't yet established a small business but have a product in mind that they want to make sure they protect.

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Amber Winters: We also include difference pre made letters and notices for various topics, so if they have something legal kind of going on.

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Amber Winters: They can send that out to their customers and now to other businesses, whatever it may be, we do have legally created documents they are created by attorneys for our resource.

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Amber Winters: And one fourth category I do want to mention.

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Amber Winters: We have quite a bit of information regarding contracts licensing and agreements so again if they are just starting their small business.

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Amber Winters: This is going to be a really important step for them, they want to make sure they have all of their bases covered.

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Amber Winters: Especially for certain things like technology Internet safety things like that, where they may not think of that as soon as they're starting a business.

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Amber Winters: But it is really important, can open them up to liability if they don't have that covered.

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Amber Winters: So again, these are the main four categories that I want you to think about when you do have small business owners coming to needing information.

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Amber Winters: If they're looking for information to any of these four categories, I would suggest sending them over to get legal forms.

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Amber Winters: They can find exactly what they're looking for and again a lot of this, you may notice isn't strictly legal related something like accounting and bookkeeping may not be immediately what you think within good legal forms, we have a large amount of contents related to that topic.

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Amber Winters: i'm going to go ahead and jump in the resource now because I think our time is best served actually looking at what's available.

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Amber Winters: So here's the homepage of of guilty go forms Now I do quickly want to point out i'm actually located in Michigan so you'll see i'm in the Michigan version of guilty or forums.

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Amber Winters: Your version may look slightly different depending on what state you're in so if you're following along with me everything may not be exactly where it is within mine, you may have categories that are labeled slightly differently, but this is the general formats of gilliam forms.

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Amber Winters: And right here on the homepage we actually have a small business section already built into the resource, so if you do have someone coming in who's not quite sure what they need.

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Amber Winters: You know they're starting a small business or maybe they have an established small business and just kind of need to move their business forward, they can click into the main category listed here in the middle of the page.

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Amber Winters: And they're going to be pulled to a lot of different forms and a lot of different categories here so you'll see the first one listed up top is accounting and finance.

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Amber Winters: And you'll see each of the categories are going to change depending on this color so you'll see the different options here.

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Amber Winters: Some categories have subcategories you'll notice there indented listed down here so from business operations, we may specifically need to go to something like direct mail, we can click directly into that.

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Amber Winters: scrolling all the way down and want to point out, we have a separate checklists section, so if I do click into this section here.

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Amber Winters: it's going to pull forward all of our checklist that we have related to small businesses So these are great if they are.

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Amber Winters: starting a new process, they don't necessarily need a form to fill out, they just want to make sure they're hitting everything they need to hit so as an example here we have a business startup checklist if I click into this now.

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Amber Winters: you'll see, I have a great description here, I can preview what this document is going to look like so you'll see here, it really is just a list of what you need to make sure you're doing.

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Amber Winters: Nothing to fill out it's just something for you to have to reference to make sure you're ready to go.

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Amber Winters: And all of our documents are downloadable so that's how you're going to get it off of the Platform and see right here, but you can download as Microsoft word or rich text.

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Amber Winters: With great and so we do have some pre built spreadsheets in here as well, especially if you're looking under accounting and bookkeeping those will download as excel sheets, so they won't be Microsoft word that's the the one.

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Amber Winters: The the one differences any spreadsheet will download as an excel.

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Amber Winters: At the very top of the page you'll see, we have a breadcrumb trail is at the very top here, so we can easily click back if you want to go back to all of our checklist we can do that.

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Amber Winters: Or, if we want to go back to just all of the small business categories, we have that option here as well.

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Amber Winters: So again, they can go through, as you would imagine this can sometimes be a little bit overwhelming, this is a very long list of bits of information.

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Amber Winters: worksheets and surveys are found at the bottom that's another helpful category.

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Amber Winters: But if they are a bit overwhelmed just by browsing through this maybe they have something really specific in mind they're looking for.

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Amber Winters: We also have a really great search engine that's going to search through all of these legal forms for them so today let's go ahead and search start a business because, of course.

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Amber Winters: that's what a lot of new entrepreneurs are going to be looking for specifically how exactly, am I going to start a business so i'm just going to run that basic search start business.

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Amber Winters: And remember, again if you're following along yours might look slightly different than this, because I am in the Michigan legal forums instance, you may be in a different state instance, but now you'll see here we have everything related to starting a business.

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Amber Winters: And I want to point out today, this first one, which is a really helpful package that we have created so.

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Amber Winters: anytime you see package in the title that's actually going to be a group of different documents specifically related to whatever that topic is so this one is a small business starter for an llc so let's click into this package to see exactly what it looks like.

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Amber Winters: I personally think this is a great one to just have on hand, maybe, something you can forward along if you do have.

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Amber Winters: You know people coming in questioning how to start a small business, if you have resources just having this packet ready for users, so they don't have to find it themselves can often be really helpful.

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Amber Winters: you'll see as I scroll down here it's going to tell me everything that's included within this package and what's great as I can download different.

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Amber Winters: Individual bits So if I don't need every single one of these, I can pick and choose which ones I want or at the top here, I can download the full package.

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Amber Winters: scrolling all the way down to the bottom you'll see we give descriptions, just like you saw with that last bit of information I clicked into but for this we're actually describing every single document that's found in this package individually.

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Amber Winters: So they're just looking at the titles not quite sure what that means, this is going to give them exactly what they're looking at so they'll know which documents they need, which they may not need.

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Amber Winters: We do still have a preview listed here so you'll see this is really going to look like a full packet here.

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Amber Winters: Again, within the packet we do provide descriptions of these different forums.

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Amber Winters: And the variable to go through and fill anything that needs to be filled up some of them are agreements, some of them are policies so as I mentioned before, a lot of times small businesses don't think about.

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Amber Winters: Internet usage being safe on the internets so they can click and download this just as one document, maybe this is what they want to look at right now, they can click on to that Microsoft word option.

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Amber Winters: it's going to pull up down here at the very bottom of the screen.

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Amber Winters: But I love when we download these.

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Amber Winters: My computer system, take a second there goes is this is completely editable.

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Amber Winters: So this is a policy agreement that they may be forwarding along to their employees to make sure that their employees are using the Internet appropriately and their business.

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Amber Winters: So this can be edited maybe there are some bits that aren't as applicable to their business, maybe they want to include something within their.

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Amber Winters: Their own personalized document, they can do whatever they want with this episode is completely editable they can save it to their computer take it with them and they'll have this great document that they'll be able to use in their business for as long as they need it.

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Amber Winters: You notice, we do have some here that can be downloaded as a PDF as well, not all are available in PDF.

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Amber Winters: But some are, of course, the PDF is only downloadable if your patron has a PDF editor so sometimes it is easier to download for us as that Microsoft word.

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Amber Winters: make any edits or tweaks that are needed, and then they can export it to a PDF if they feel like it's necessary to have it in that formatting.

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Okay.

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Amber Winters: So that's what I have for you today a very short and simple look at some of the small business resources we have within this session.

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Amber Winters: And since we have a couple minutes I would love to open up the floor to any questions you may have if there's specific types of resources, you want to see within this.

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Amber Winters: Within this resource, please let me know what I can pull those up of course there's a lot more than small business information here but that's what we're going.

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Amber Winters: we're going through today, so please go ahead and type in any questions you have into that chat I will be able to answer those now.

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Amber Winters: And while you're doing that i'm going to go ahead and jump back here to my presentation.

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Amber Winters: Okay, it looks like we have a question, do they offer permanent links or URLs we can add to our websites lower right now we don't let me jump back into the resource.

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Amber Winters: Right now, we don't have permanent leaks here let's go ahead and click back into one of these, so you can take a look.

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Amber Winters: So we don't have permanent links what might be helpful, is for you to you can download this to your own computer and forwarded along.

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Amber Winters: You can put the Microsoft word documents on your own web page, you can certainly always copy and paste out of the address bar if you'd like to do it that way, but right now we don't have permanent links for you to use within the resource.

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Amber Winters: looks like another question here sorry if I pause for a second i'm.

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Amber Winters: Reading through in a reading and talking is not my strong suit our other state forms available example Pennsylvania, and the Maryland databases.

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Amber Winters: So your instance whatever state you're in will just contain that states documents, I will say for tax forms if you're looking for specifically tax forms, you do have every states tax information available, but you will only have your state specific documents within your instance.

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Amber Winters: And Laura your question about permanent URLs same answer for me right now we don't have a permanent URL.

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Amber Winters: option to click into if you do find a legal form or some sort of form that you think is important, I would suggest either downloading it to your computer or you can pull the link.

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Amber Winters: out off of the address bar, if you would like to do it that way, but right now we don't have a tool setup within the resource for getting a permanent link.

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Amber Winters: Okay, so we're just at a time here looks like we have one more minute I do want to give you some information.

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Amber Winters: Moving forward, of course, this was a very quick session, if you want to know more about Gil legal forms, or maybe have a deeper dive with someone I gail.

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Amber Winters: You do have access to a customer success manager, who can help walk you through that resource.

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Amber Winters: Who can also talk about best practices for increasing usage and things like that, if you don't know your customer success manager is you can certainly reach out to gail that customer success as engaged calm.

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Amber Winters: And you'll be forwarded to the correct individual who will be able to help you out.

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Amber Winters: I have included my information here as well, if you have a question that you didn't want to ask live, you can send me an email it's amber that winters at cengage calm.

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Amber Winters: And finally, we do have a session survey, if you don't mind taking that it's actually already populated in your browser as soon as you launch zoom it's populated that So if you don't mind, it should take you.

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Amber Winters: More than one or two minutes, I do have a link here as well, bit that leap forward slash gail training survey, if you would like to take it that way Okay, we have another quick question here.

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Amber Winters: So I will be sending slides in an email or this information be available through an archive so the recording itself will be stored on our support site which is support that gail calm.

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Amber Winters: It will also be emailed to you tomorrow so you'll have a full.

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Amber Winters: A full copy of this recording as well as your certificate of attendance I can certainly link slides in there as well, if you all would like to take a look at the slides, but you will have the full recording sent to you tomorrow via email.
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