Key points:
- • EPGD Business Law blends entrepreneurial roots with enterprise-level services, emphasizing proactive legal planning as a long-term investment.
- • Rising litigation in Miami reflects rapid business formation, tech-driven shortcuts in transactional work, and a dense entrepreneurial ecosystem.
- • Macroeconomic pressures and global trade exposure are increasing risk, making structured agreements and preventative counsel more critical than ever.
February 2026 — Invest: spoke with Oscar Gomez, managing partner and chair of the litigation group at EPGD Business Law, about Miami’s entrepreneur-driven growth, the rising stakes of business litigation, and why proactive legal planning matters. “Legal services is an investment in getting things right, so you don’t have to pay more later,” Gomez said.
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What does EPGD Business Law do, and how do you ensure clients receive solutions tailored to their specific business needs?
Our law firm started as a firm geared toward entrepreneurs, or people who were starting businesses. Over the years, we’ve grown into a larger firm. We’re about a 30-attorney firm now.
Today, we tailor services both to entrepreneurs and to enterprise clients, meaning bigger companies. So we support small, medium, and large organizations. But the core reason we can tailor effectively is that the roots of the firm are in entrepreneurship. That’s how we started.
We spent years working with founders on funding, their journey, and the day-to-day realities of building a company. Our attorneys have that background and that mindset. It shows up in how we approach problems and how we communicate with business owners, because we understand the pressures of starting, scaling, and operating with limited time and resources.
Even though the firm has grown, we’ve stayed grounded in that entrepreneurship mentality. That helps us deliver services to clients in a way that feels legitimate and genuine, because it comes from understanding what that journey looks like.
From a litigation perspective, what are the most common legal mistakes small and mid-sized businesses make, and how can they avoid them?
Legal services is an investment in getting things right, so you don’t have to pay more later. One of the most common mistakes small and mid-sized businesses make is not wanting to make that investment.
When you’re starting a company, or you’re still smaller, everything can feel more scarce. So business owners try to hold off on spending money wherever they can, including on attorneys. A lot of times, that’s a mistake. People convince themselves they can do things on their own, but if they scale and become successful, the issues they didn’t address early often end up costing far more on the back end.
The businesses that avoid these mistakes are the ones that plan and prioritize legal services as a form of insurance. They treat it as a way to ensure they’re doing things the right way, so that as they grow, they’re not hit with surprises.
On a basic level, it often comes down to corporate documents and corporate formalities. Those are foundational steps. They’re not even expensive, but they can save a lot of problems in the long run. They also set the framework for building the company the right way, instead of letting it grow in whatever direction happens naturally, without structure or clarity among owners and partners.
There’s also a newer version of this issue now. It’s not new that small businesses use general document services to generate contracts. Today, with AI, it’s even easier to produce a contract or a template quickly. Those tools can help with general understanding, but they’re not individualized solutions. If you want something that truly addresses your industry and your business, that’s much harder to do without guidance, especially if you’re not a lawyer and don’t know what details you should be building into the document.
What role does preventative legal counsel play in the services you provide, and how do you educate clients on proactive legal strategies?
I’m a litigator. Our firm does a wide variety of corporate work, but my focus is on trial work and litigation. The first thing I always tell any C-suite executive or business owner is that any dollar you spend up front, before you have a problem, is probably worth $10 you’re going to spend later if you don’t do it.
The cost difference is real. Doing work up front is significantly cheaper than litigation or anything that happens once there’s already an antagonistic situation. Once there’s litigation, you have entrenched interests that are financially against each other. That makes it longer, more difficult to unpack, and harder to resolve.
Preventive legal counsel is about building the foundation early. It’s about structuring the business correctly, setting expectations clearly, and putting agreements in place that reduce ambiguity. That’s how businesses protect themselves, and it’s how they set themselves up to grow with fewer disruptions.
What emerging trends or shifts are you seeing in business litigation that entrepreneurs and business owners should be aware of?
Litigation in the United States is blowing up. It’s getting bigger, and transactional work is getting smaller for a lot of the reasons we’ve been talking about. More businesses are turning to technology for transactional work. That can make things faster, but it can also build up problems if the work isn’t truly tailored or if companies skip important steps.
When you talk about Miami as a market, Miami has become more than just a place where large companies set up shop. That’s part of the story, but Miami has also become a hub for small entrepreneurs who have dreams and want to build something.
Brickell, in particular, has become an environment where you see young people with a lot of ideas all working on something. They’re hustling, trying to build themselves into something. That shift has become a defining characteristic over the last five to 10 years, and especially since COVID. You have people moving from around the country with an idea and a plan, and they want to come to Miami because they see it as an entrepreneur-friendly place with energy and opportunity.
When you have that kind of entrepreneurial density, it brings a lot of litigation. It’s a natural result of rapid business formation, partnerships, and scaling. That’s also why you see bigger law firms continuing to expand in Miami. It’s not only the large companies coming in; it’s also the volume of entrepreneurs and growing businesses operating in the market.
Traditionally, Miami litigation has been heavily tied to industries like real estate, construction, and healthcare, and those remain major. But now it’s broader. It touches almost everything because business activity is rising across many industries at the same time.
What emerging legal challenges do you think businesses may face over the next few years, and how is the firm preparing to help clients navigate them?
There are challenges already in the market, including tariffs and international instability. Some of those challenges hit Miami more than other markets because so much importing and exporting happens through Miami, and so many businesses here are tied to global activity.
On a broader level, you also have major macroeconomic factors. Interest rates are still fairly high. Inflation has gone down somewhat, but you still have inflation. These are the kinds of conditions that can stress businesses, change consumer behavior, tighten capital, and increase the likelihood of disputes.
What I’ve found is that the U.S. economy has become much more complex over the last 15 to 20 years. It used to feel more straightforward, where people focused on a handful of indicators. Now there are more moving parts, globally and domestically, and they affect businesses in different ways depending on their industry and their exposure.
Many entrepreneurs and smaller business owners are focused on getting their foothold and building the business. They’re not always paying attention to macro signals. But those forces can shape costs, contracts, supply chains, and risk. Our job is to help clients plan, structure relationships carefully, and build agreements that hold up even when the environment gets more challenging.
What makes Miami attractive to entrepreneurs?
The entrepreneurial spirit in Miami is a big angle that gets missed a lot. In my practice, I’ve seen the number of people from around the United States who have moved to Miami over the last five to six years specifically to set up a business. They come here saying they want to be business owners, and they see Miami as a friendly place to do it.
There are a lot of reasons for that, including Florida’s business-friendly environment at the state level and factors like no state income tax. But beyond the policy side, there’s also momentum. There’s a real concentration of people building, taking risks, and trying to scale. That entrepreneurial energy is a defining characteristic of Miami right now, and it’s shaping growth across the region.
Want more? Read the Invest: Miami report.
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