Singh Law Firm's contrarian advice for early-stage entrepreneurs
Most founders meet a bankruptcy attorney once, and only once: the day everything has already gone wrong. JT Singh thinks that is the most expensive mistake an entrepreneur can make.
Singh, who founded Singh Law Firm P.A. and has built the firm into a multi-state practice covering bankruptcy, business law, and corporate counsel, has been making a quiet argument to early-stage clients for years. The argument: the questions a good bankruptcy lawyer asks at the formation stage are the same questions a good corporate attorney should be asking, but rarely does.
Which personal assets are exposed if the company defaults? Where is the line between founder liability and corporate liability? What does the term sheet’s personal guarantee actually cover? How are the founders’ separate property and community property treated under the operating agreement? These are restructuring questions. They are also founding questions. The two stages share more architecture than founders realize.
The Singh Law Firm intake process for early-stage clients runs through a checklist that would be familiar to a Chapter 11 partner: pre-default planning, asset segregation, cross-collateralization risk, fraudulent conveyance exposure. Most founders have never heard those terms before the first conversation. By the second conversation, they understand why every one of them matters.
The argument cuts against startup-world conventional wisdom. Founders are told to find a corporate attorney who knows venture deals. They are told the bankruptcy lawyer comes later, if ever. Singh’s view is that the corporate attorney who has never sat across from a creditors’ committee misses the questions that matter most when capital gets tight.
This is not a hypothetical concern. Roughly two thirds of venture-backed companies fail. A fraction of those failures are clean wind-downs. The rest involve some form of distressed exit, asset sale, or restructuring. Founders who set up their entities, agreements, and personal exposure with a restructuring lens at day one have a meaningfully different experience when the storm arrives.
Singh Law Firm has handled both sides of that equation. Founders who came in early sit in completely different conversations than founders who arrive at month thirty-six with a missed payroll and a panicked board. The early conversations are tactical. The late conversations are triage.
The firm’s approach is not to push every founder into formal restructuring planning. The advice is more practical: ask the bankruptcy questions while building, even if the formal restructuring practice is never engaged. The questions cost nothing. The answers shape what the founder signs.
For the founder reading this and wondering whether the conversation is worth having, Singh’s standing offer is the cheapest insurance available in early-stage company building: thirty minutes of time with a restructuring-trained attorney, asked at the right stage, has saved Singh Law Firm clients millions in personal exposure they did not know they were taking on.
The lawyer who walks in last cannot rewrite the first contract. Singh is making the case that more founders should let the right lawyer in first.