For business owners & founders
Serving entrepreneurs at every stage, from startups, to established businesses, to those ready to sell. A boutique, concierge practice with a modern-day approach, across Maryland, DC, and Virginia.
The arc
Most companies meet a lawyer twice: once at formation, once when something breaks. The work below is sequenced the way a business actually grows, with each stage built on documents drafted in the one before it.
01 / Form
Choosing the vehicle that fits your tax picture, your partners, and the capital you intend to raise, then papering it properly.
02 / Contract
The paper your revenue runs on. Drafted once, well, so it holds up the tenth time you use it and the day someone disputes it.
03 / Hire
Getting the first hires and the first misclassification question right, before a payroll audit or a departure makes it expensive.
04 / Raise
Terms you can live with three rounds from now, documented in the instruments investors in this region expect to see.
05 / Grow
Buying a competitor, a book of business, or a location, with diligence that surfaces what the seller would rather you find later.
06 / Exit
The stage owners postpone longest. A sale, a transfer to the next generation, or a partner buyout works best when it was drafted years earlier.
Alongside
Compliance deadlines, a lease renewal, a partner dispute, a question you need answered today. These run in parallel with everything above.
Staying in good standing in every state where you actually do business, and in whatever your industry adds on top.
Your lease is usually the second-largest obligation you sign. It is also the one most often signed unread.
When negotiation stops working. The firm's litigation practice is the reason its contracts are drafted the way they are.
Concierge-level general counsel for companies that need a lawyer's judgment regularly but not a lawyer's salary line.
The DMV problem
A company headquartered in Bethesda with a client in Arlington and an employee in the District isn't operating in one legal environment. It's operating in three. Entity registration, non-compete enforceability, wage-and-hour rules, and business licensing each work differently across the line.
Who you work with
A modern-day approach to business law: direct access to your attorney, plain answers on your timeline, online scheduling and video meetings, so the legal work moves as fast as the company does.
“Business owners rarely need a memo. They need a decision they can act on this week, and documents that hold when someone tests them.”
The Law Office of Brian Gormley, LLC has advised clients across Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia since 2003. Working with entrepreneurs sits at the intersection of what the firm already does every day: entity formation and business law, commercial real estate, business disputes and succession planning, and the estate planning that ties an owner's company to everything else they own.
That combination matters more than it sounds. The lawyer drafting your operating agreement is the one who has litigated what happens when those provisions are tested, and the one who understands how a buy-sell provision interacts with your will.
Concierge service is the practical part: you work directly with the attorney handling your matter, not a rotating bench, and you get calls returned, questions answered between engagements, and a firm that already knows your documents before you ask.
Before you call
They aren't quite the same kind of choice. An LLC is an entity type; S-Corp is a tax election that an LLC or a corporation can make. The practical question is usually whether your profit is high enough that paying yourself a reasonable salary and taking the remainder as a distribution saves more in self-employment tax than the added payroll and filing costs.
The answer changes with your revenue, your number of owners, whether you plan to raise outside capital, and which state you file in. It's worth a conversation with your accountant in the room.
If you intend to raise institutional venture capital, a Delaware C-Corp is what most investors expect and it's often simpler to start there than to convert later. If you're running a services business, a practice, a contractor, or a local operating company, incorporating in Delaware usually just adds a franchise tax and a foreign-qualification filing in the state where you actually work.
Those services file your articles. What they generally don't produce is the document that governs the company: an operating agreement or set of bylaws written for your actual ownership split, decision rights, capital contributions, and what happens if a founder leaves.
The gap tends to stay invisible until there's money or a disagreement involved, which is exactly when it becomes expensive to fix.
Potentially quite a lot: whether you need to register to do business in the District, which wage payment and paid leave rules apply, what your employment agreement can and can't restrict, and where any dispute would be heard. Crossing a jurisdictional line in this region is routine, but it's rarely automatic.
A concierge relationship instead of one-off engagements: a lawyer who already knows your contracts, your cap table, and your filing calendar, available for the fast questions as well as the deals. Scope and structure are set to match how often you actually need counsel. We'll talk through what fits before anything is committed to.
Whatever exists: formation documents, any operating agreement or bylaws, your standard client or vendor contract, your lease, and a short description of what you're trying to do next. If none of that exists yet, that's a perfectly normal starting point too.
Next step
Initial consultations are complimentary. Come with a question, a contract someone sent you, or a plan for the next twelve months, whichever you have. Book online, meet in Bethesda or by video, and work directly with the attorney on your matter.