Private Companies and Emerging Businesses

Business clients have long looked to Squire Sanders to meet their particular needs or goals for growth. In some cases, a company’s transition from small to large happens rapidly on a host of related business and legal fronts. Private and emerging businesses want seasoned lawyers to provide them with dedicated, insightful guidance and leadership through intricate legal issues and to assist them in dealing with finance, mergers and acquisitions, and other issues that require a high degree of expertise and experience. In other situations, these businesses are simply looking for help with the legal advice larger companies seek from in-house counsel, but are not yet at the point of needing to hire inside legal staff.

 

Whatever the circumstance, Squire Sanders can help. We bring to bear the breadth of experience and responsiveness you need:

• Access to business lawyers experienced with a broad range of legal issues
• Familiarity with business requirements, from high-tech startups to large multinational concerns
• Sensitivity to client, market, business and legal requirements and concerns, both domestic and international
• Prompt hands-on and on-site responsiveness
• Cost-effective analysis, direction and execution of legal needs

 

When you rely on our services, there is no need to add legal staff to your payroll. The end result: Executive management can run the business with dedicated business lawyers supporting their goals.

 

With all our clients, we employ a team approach. We are able to call on a number of lawyers familiar with our clients’ products, technologies and business models. Additionally, we often bring in lawyers from our firm’s diverse practice areas and global offices to assist on issues as they arise. Lawyers from our offices in Europe, Asia and Latin America often provide a broad range of legal services to local subsidiaries and operations of US-based private or emerging businesses, and our US lawyers provide similar services in the United States to non-US-based private and emerging businesses.

 

We empower and enable our clients to reach, and indeed surpass, their goals and expectations. The result is that our clients find themselves more able to effectively satisfy their customers’ requirements, while at the same time ensuring that their businesses are safeguarded from a commercial and legal point of view.

 

From startup to international expansion, Squire Sanders offers your company flexibility in filling its needs for legal counsel. You receive as much support as you require from experienced lawyers – when you need it and where you need it.

 

Private Companies

For more than 100 years, private companies have come to rely on Squire Sanders as a valuable business adviser and legal counselor with the depth and breadth of expertise and experience to address all of their legal needs in a timely, cost-effective manner.

 

Our clients range from growing and middle market businesses to large, privately held global companies operating in a variety of industries. In addition to providing streamlined counsel on day-to-day corporate and commercial work, we represent our clients when more sophisticated legal challenges arise – mergers and acquisitions, financings, complex tax issues and global expansion, to name just a few examples.

 

Our firm operates as a single integrated partnership, allowing our corporate lawyers to leverage the work of colleagues across all our offices, not only in our corporate practice, but also in such related practices as financial services, intellectual property, labor and employment, litigation, real estate, and tax and employee benefits. Thus we avoid the need to constantly “re-invent the wheel,” maximizing value at every turn. To that end, our lawyers have developed a common set of time-saving tools, legal products and communication programs that utilize technology to the fullest and enhance our ability to focus our talents where needed most on a moment’s notice and efficiently tackle the matter at hand.

 

Serving as outside general counsel to our clients allows us to remain in close touch with the specific legal issues they face, as well as their strategic plans and any potential issues that might arise from those plans. By having access to lawyers for an affordable fee, our clients can be more flexible in seeking legal advice on routine or smaller matters and thus avoid a decision that later could prove costly.

 

When your company is ready to step onto the international stage, the networking and expansion possibilities offered by our global platform allow us to build on the insight we have gained serving as day-to-day adviser to take your company to the next level.

 

Emerging Businesses

Emerging businesses face many challenges. Having to deal with uncertain legal issues should not be one of them. Our expertise in the business, financial, regulatory and intellectual property issues involved in starting and growing new businesses is enhanced by our depth of resources devoted to supporting companies in the next stages of their growth: from starting up and establishing a business to angel and venture capital financings, and from initial public offerings and follow-on equity and debt financings to strategic alliances and mergers and acquisitions.

 

We are familiar with the legal and business issues facing growth companies and those who invest in them at all stages of their growth cycle. Accordingly, we are able to educate younger companies, including emerging technology companies, about the legal and business problems they will face as they succeed and grow. Moreover, we are committed to providing efficient and cost-effective legal services with the speed, accuracy, judgment and low cost that emerging companies and their investors must have from their professional advisers.

 

Our contribution to the client/lawyer relationship is to keep our eye firmly on the business needs and goals of your company, and to use our experience and knowledge to guide the company’s growth. Our extensive domestic and international regulatory knowledge in industries such as telecommunications, energy, aviation, healthcare and government contracting gives us a unique understanding of a startup’s business and enables us to better serve your interests.

 

Our lawyers have prepared a comprehensive set of guidelines to help entrepreneurs and business owners establish their business structures and policies to protect investments and grow their business. From entity formation and tax planning to securing appropriate financing, and from drafting employment policies and protecting your intellectual property to successfully resolving cross-border issues, our lawyers provide the advice your business needs to succeed in the ever-changing global marketplace.

 

General Services Provided

Squire Sanders typically provides the following services on an as-needed basis, on site or remotely, to meet our clients’ requirements for legal services normally provided by in-house general counsel:

• Drafting buy-sell, stock forfeiture and other shareholder agreements
• Advice on executive and employee compensation and benefits including stock option, phantom stock, restricted stock and other incentive compensation and retirement plans
• Counseling on labor and employment issues including terminations and noncompetition agreements
• Contract and lease review, drafting and negotiation support, in both commercial and governmental markets
• Software and technology licensing and protection
• Tax planning and advice including the selection of an appropriate legal entity
• Regulatory advice including environmental and government contract matters
• Transactional support on mergers, acquisitions and divestitures
• Advice and services regarding litigation and dispute resolution
• Structuring strategic alliances and joint ventures