 In a tough economy, small businesses are constantly looking for ways to become more efficient while continuing to grow. Several states are taking steps to meet this challenge by reducing the burden of legal paperwork faced by businesses. The state of Nevada recently launched a one-stop shop for both entrepreneurs and LLCs to legally register a business, obtain business licenses, and even file critical legal documents. This full-service digital depot for businesses is called Silverflume. I think Silverflume in our one-stop portal is an absolute game changer for the state. Instead of having to run to 50 different state agencies and fill out a paper-based form in order to obtain your license, you can now do that through one-stop shop and do it from the comfort of your desktop computer. But the processes for making a business compliant with state laws aren't simple. Nevada's business portal administrator Karen Michael helped lead a team to tackle bringing business compliance to the web. The state for the business customer before Silverflume came along was they were required to do all these compliances, but they really were given no guidance as to the sequence of the steps and how to go about that, and there was a lot of redundancy. Since that time, Nevada has figured out ways of turning complex paperwork into simpler checkbox formats. The Silverflume process is as simple as filling out a web form. It's how you figure out who's going to manage the LLC, what happens if a change is proposed, what happens if one of your members leaves. And it's all those kinds of details that oftentimes are the stumbling blocks for small LLCs once they've actually formed. At the Business Resource Innovation Center in Carson City, Nevada, counselor Michael Saloga works daily with entrepreneurs who struggle through the red tape of launching their business. When people are asking about how to get things started, how to start a business, we're pointing them to Silverflume right off the bat. And the reason is because these are things that are critical to getting their business started. Then we can start talking about the things that we love to get involved with, which is, what's your idea? What's your concept? How do you want to start that business from the standpoint of finding customers? Silverflume being in place for us and being able to say, going right to the bottom of the website, if you don't know how to do it, click here. It helps you step through that process that makes it so easy for folks. Business owner Greg Dye sees the tool as a way to help save time and eliminate extra steps. Whether the business is a corporation or a proprietorship or a partnership or something, it's all based upon the same common denominators on information. Everybody pretty much has to put down the same information. And then for specifics, they might infill it a little bit more. Having that information be able to fill them at one point and transfer that as I apply for another license and have most of that infill where it's applicable, that's a game changer. That saves us money, it saves us time, it makes the process easier, and it greatly reduces the chances that we're going to make a clerical error or do something that's good to get our application bounced back. Nevada is one of only a handful of states in addition to Vermont and Delaware that are experimenting with allowing entrepreneurs to form businesses completely digitally. Oliver Goodenough, director of the Law Lab at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and key figure in getting Vermont's digital corporations framework off the ground, sees this as a part of a growing trend. When you're starting up a business, there's lots of reasons why you probably should be in touch with the state and the state should be in touch with you. One of the things that technology will let us do is to structure those interactions in a more efficient way, in a way that doesn't ask the same questions six times for six different departments. What we have been working on here at the Law Lab at the Berkman Center and working with states like Nevada on, is how do you not only automate the initial formation process, how do you set up automated agreements like the automated LLC agreement that Nevada has taken on and make that available to people so that we have a simple template for a basic kind of agreement that people can plug into, it's not on paper. The original is the software. Secretary of State Ross Miller sees silver flume as an important competitive step. Not to control the way businesses are run, but to create a clear path for starting a business, streamline the process of the day-to-day and remove roadblocks of moving the business into the future. Nevada has the second highest number of entities on file per capita behind only Delaware. And so I think when viewed in the eyes of the nation's business public, Nevada is already the second best place to incorporate to do business. Part of that reputation has to do with the ease of filing transactions. And this is a significant step forward. Obviously every state is trying to move towards the creation of a one-stop shop. I'm very confident in our competitive advantage. There are still plenty of other hurdles business owners have to deal with. To the business community, silver flume is helping them get to the fun part. You know, I can see how silver flume will change business in Nevada in the sense that people won't feel like it's a big hurdle to get one started. They'll still have to go through the process of developing a business plan or potentially going out and raising funds. But to get to that point will be so much easier because they will have this tool to work with. One of the great things about silver flume is that it makes this available as a public service. Basically you can sign up and use the agreement. They'll run it in their own cloud. They'll take care of it for you. And you can bring people in from all over the world, participate through the website. It is a great service to consider if you're going to start a company. To find out more about silver flume and learn how digital firm formation works visit Silver Flume and the Law Lab on the web in the silverflume.gov or lawlab.org.