From Day One to Exit - and Every Stage In Between
We represent entrepreneurs and privately-held businesses throughout the entire business lifecycle:
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ideation
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entity selection
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formation
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preparation of standard contracts
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negotiation of bespoke agreements
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friends-and-family, venture, and private equity funding and debt
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growth and scaling
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introduction of new products
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entry into new markets
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mergers and acquisitions
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partial and complete liquidity events
We stand beside you for the whole journey.
Entity Selection, Formation, & Structuring
The decisions you make at the start shape everything that follows — how you are taxed, how you govern, how you bring in partners, and how you eventually exit. We help founders choose the right structure, document it correctly, and build a governance framework that protects everyone and preserves flexibility for what comes next. Getting this right at the beginning is far cheaper than fixing it later.
Outside General Counsel
The number of people who have started a business for the purpose of filing, registering, or complying is exactly zero. People go into business to make and sell something, to build something, to capitalize on an advantage they see that others don't. Everything else — the compliance, the contracts, the registrations, the legal brushfires — is at best an annoyance and at worst a liability waiting to happen.
For businesses that don't have — or don't yet need — full-time legal staff, we serve as your standing outside general counsel. We review contracts, answer questions, manage relationships with other counsel, and serve as your first call when a legal question touches your business. We stay close enough to your operations to give you proactive guidance, not just reactive advice. Most of our clients tell us that having us in their corner changes how they make decisions — not just which ones they make.
Contracts & Commercial Agreements
Contracts are not just legal documents. They are statements of intent, allocations of risk, and — as we often remind clients — they send a message about your professionalism before a single term is negotiated. We draft, review, and negotiate the full range of commercial agreements: vendor and supplier contracts, customer agreements, NDAs, licensing arrangements, employment and consulting agreements, and more. We write contracts that reflect how your business actually works — not how a different business in a different industry once operated.
Capital Raises & Financing
Whether you are raising a friends-and-family round, negotiating a bank credit facility, structuring mezzanine debt, or preparing for a venture or private equity raise, we have been through it. We help entrepreneurs choose the right type of capital for their stage and circumstances — the right club for the shot, as we often put it — navigate diligence and documentation, and understand exactly what they are agreeing to. In plain English. Before they sign.
Mergers, Acquisitions & Exits
Most founders spend twenty or more years building a business before they seriously think about selling it. By then, the decision about whether they have a valuable, transferable enterprise — or an expensive job that happens to generate good income — has largely already been made.
We believe exit planning is not something you do when you're ready to sell. It is something you do throughout the life of the business, starting earlier than feels necessary and revisiting regularly. The founder who arrives at a transaction having thought deliberately about succession, about decoupling enterprise value from their own daily presence, about the right kind of buyer for what they've built — that founder almost always achieves a better outcome than the one who starts thinking about it six months before going to market.
The exit landscape is also more complex than most founders realize. There are M&A attorneys, ESOP specialists, family succession advisors, and a wide range of private equity structures — each a legitimate path, each right for a different situation, and each with advocates who will tell you their approach is the answer without necessarily asking whether it's the right question. We help founders navigate that landscape with a map, not a predetermined destination.
We represent founders and privately held businesses on the sell side, and acquirers and platform companies on the buy side. We have handled transactions ranging from small add-on acquisitions to complex, multi-entity deals valued in the hundreds of millions. We know how to get deals done, how to protect what you've built, and how to keep a transaction on track when it threatens to come apart.
Growth & Scaling
Opening new locations. Launching new products. Entering new markets. Hiring key people and building the right incentive structures. Every phase of growth creates new legal complexity — and new opportunities to get things right or wrong. We help our clients anticipate those moments rather than react to them.
Engagement Process Summary
Every engagement starts with a scope call — a conversation about your business and what you need, at no charge. From there, we issue a written scope of work and fee proposal before anything starts. You know exactly what you're getting, what it will cost, and what happens next.
That's true whether you're signing up for ongoing outside general counsel or bringing us in for a single transaction. Predictability is not a feature. It's the foundation.