General Counsel Services
Fortune 500 boards and PE sponsors rely on us as their agile outside general counsel – turning risks into advantages and opportunities into instant value.
Pillars of Our Practice
Business Counsel
Regulation Compliance
Risk Mitigation
Legal Budgeting
Collaborative Missions
Proactive Planning
Purpose Driven Solutions
Intervention & Loss Preventions
Business Counsel
Today’s businesses face a more competitive landscape than ever before, but opportunities for growth have never been better. With reliable business counsel services, well-managed companies can achieve their strategic development goals with Spizzirri Law LLC by their side. Drawing on over 30 years of business, legal, tax and financial experience we help businesses manage risks and allocate resources for growth with strategic management of your legal function and we are ready to collaborate with you. Business owners may view legal expenses as unnecessary or even wasteful. However, appropriate legal expenses add business value and driving a higher sales price upon exit.
For example:
- Careful drafting of legal agreements, governing instruments and contract management mitigate or eliminate civil litigation expense.
- Regulatory compliance including preparation and compliance during the ordinary course of business before a regulatory investigation begins is much more cost effective than preparing documentation during an investigation or in response to regulatory information requests and then arguing for abatement of penalties and interest.
- Risk management to mitigate unexpected loss outside the owner’s control from negligence, natural disasters or other outside factors through insurance and organizational structuring.
Engagement Letters
Our team will conduct due diligence on existing contracts to determine areas of improvement and recommend steps to avoid potential disputes. This practice strengthens your company’s relationship with customers and vendors, so you can enjoy mutual benefits.
If legal expenses exceed your operating budget, consider investing in solutions that give you control. Our methodology has helped clients lower legal costs. If engagement letter issues persist, we can review agreements to identify risks and help strengthen trade partnerships, avoiding litigation. Rely on our guidance to manage risks that may drain resources.
We troubleshoot your existing agreements to avoid legal issues in a subsequent sale, redemption of the founder, or recapitalization.
The absence of provisions for succession planning, distributions in complete redemption, reorganizations, mergers, or other transactions often create chaos that can kill the deal, destroy deal value, or result in extremely expensive transactional litigation between stakeholders. Often, companies forego detailing these provisions to save a thousand dollars at formation, only to suffer a loss of millions in the future.
- Renegotiating Evolving Contractual Relationships is a Key to Avoiding Disputes
- Increased Contractual Complexity
- Dispute Prevention & Avoidance
- Contract Management as a mechanism to reinforce relationships with Customers and Vendors
- Mutually profitable contractual relationships evolve to accommodate change enjoying reduced litigation risk, enhanced satisfaction and improved profitability.
Enterprise Risk Mitigation
Working with Spizzirri Law LLC ensures that proactive steps are taken to reduce the risk of your business ventures, which improves your profitability. Those steps include everything from reviewing insurance policies to securing your intellectual property.
Under our preventative approach, your company’s cash flow is more reliable; you can generate profits or raise capital with reduced risk and your business enjoys greater profitability.
Our proactive approach begins with a top-to-bottom diagnostic review of your legal function to identify potential problems and areas for improvement. As project management professionals who identify profit opportunities, we continuously refine strategic and tactical policies with the goal of maximizing enterprise value while mitigating or eliminating risk.
Preventative Maintenance
Reduce Costs, increase predictability and produce better outcomes
Proactive v. Reactive
Litigation Reduction
Alternative Dispute Resolution
Commercial negotiation of disputes as a method to improve customer and vendor relationships
Legal Budgeting
Budget to increase the value of your business. We provide numerous strategic advantages, including a more profitable exit strategy for:
Greater Cost Reduction
Efficient Project Management
Improved Budget Forecasting
Proactive Planning Rather than Reactive Fire Drills Result in:
Better time management
More Predictable Cash Flow
Risk Reduction
Improved Profitability
Increased Enterprise Value
Reduced Cost of Capital
Lower Tax Burden
Insightful Business Planning
Litigation often reduces profits and diverts attention from core business goals. If you’re questioning your legal counsel’s value, consider a new approach. Paul Spizzirri, Esq., a business attorney and his team have over 30 years’ experience, partners with clients to design controlled, budgeted legal plans. Spizzirri Law LLC proactively identifies and addresses issues so you can stay focused on your business.
Regulatory Compliance
We help lower the risks in your business through proactive measures such as insurance reviews and intellectual property protection, leading to more predictable cash flow and higher profits. Our approach starts with a thorough legal diagnostic to spot issues and areas for improvement. As project management experts, we refine strategies to boost enterprise value while minimizing risk. Preventative maintenance reduces costs, increases predictability, and delivers better results.
- Proactive is less costly than Reactive
- Litigation Reduction or avoidance is more cost effective than Litigation Costs
- Alternative Dispute Resolution such as mediation or arbitration can be less expensive than litigation
- Commercial negotiation of disputes as a method to improve customer relationships can increase revenues and avoid litigation expense
Third-Party Risk Identification, Management and Mitigation
- Transactional Structuring
- Organizational Structuring
- Risk Management
Litigation and Class Actions
M&A, False Claims (Qui Tam), Employment, Asbestos, Patent Trolls, Loss of Chance Damages and Injury-less Claims, Plaintiff’s Bar & State Attorney General Alliances
Knowledge Management
To reduce legal expenses, many emerging companies overlook obtaining patents, copyrights, or trademarks, which can lead to a loss of enterprise value. We encourage companies to look at intellectual property protection expenditures as investments in appreciating assets that will maximize enterprise value at the time of sale. This comparatively moderate cost is always preferable to extremely expensive litigation to defend the company’s brand from infringement, customer confusion, fraud, and misrepresentation by other actors who exploit unprotected intellectual property assets for their own profit.
Proactive Compliance Initiatives
Review Compliance Procedures
Provide Documentation Guidelines
Develop Best Practices
Continuous Examination Preparation
Preparation
Organization
Documentation
Reverse Due Diligence
Proactive Remedial Measures
International Business
The purpose of international planning is to add legal certainty to cross-border transactions between private parties, either as individuals or corporations. International business organizational and transactional structuring can involve a patchwork of conventions, protocols, model laws, legal guides, uniform documents, case law, practice, and custom, which form a regulatory framework for relationships among private parties in an international context.
For success in matters of international law, an attorney must be able to collaborate smoothly and efficiently with legal counsel in-country. As a business law firm in Atlanta, we have participated in several multijurisdictional, complex litigation matters in Latin America, Europe and Asia, including alternative dispute resolution processes in the People’s Republic of China.
We also have experience forming and optimizing transactional entities worldwide, such as new holding companies and special purpose entities. We have worked to refine international intercompany transactional agreements and transfer pricing analysis. We have managed legal issues related to corporate structuring, intellectual property, employment and labor, securities, litigation, alternative dispute resolution, contract management, risk management, budgeting, and third-party risk assessments.
When you retain our services for your international venture, the Spizzirri team takes a proactive approach to minimize risk and enhance the value of your investment.
Counsel services are comprehensive. We generally begin with a total review of all your company’s documents: business plan, ownership agreements, employment contracts, shareholder agreements, company bylaws, company handbook, permits, insurance policies, loan contracts, commercial contracts, and commercial leases. This provides us with an intimate understanding of your enterprise and enables us to make specific recommendations on the steps you can take to minimize risk. We also work with your development officer to vet strategic opportunities. Finally, when disputes arise, we take decisive steps to preserve the value of the contract or relationship in question and get your operations back on track.