Thoughts About Law and Business

After law school, I was an attorney for a few years with the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington, DC. The Commission was only a couple of years old at that point and still needed to address many Congressional mandates, such as regulating commodity pool operators and commodity trading advisors. As a staff member of the Commission, I sought input from Commission experts and the futures trading industry and then created and drafted many regulatory proposals. I participated at Commission hearings where the public was able to comment on the proposed rules and at Commission meetings where the Commission acted on the proposals.

I was Treasurer and Counsel for six years with the family building supply business. My first couple of years with the company occurred during the period of extremely high mortgage rates, which also occurred at about the time of my father’s death. After his death, with interest rates still high, many builders failing and others unable to pay their bills, much of my time was spent negotiating with builders, vendors and banks regarding liens, mortgages and 
repayment structures.

For eight years, I was owner and principal of a real estate development firm and a construction firm involved with renovations of historic structures. This required extensive negotiation, both with partners and lenders, in both the acquisition and development phases. Projects included renovation of an abandoned silver factory into modern commercial office space, and two abandoned state armories in different cities, one into luxury condominium townhouses and the other into tax-credit-assisted housing.

Over the course of seven years, I served as in-house counsel for a rapidly growing software engineering/development firm in the healthcare reimbursement industry and contracts counsel for a startup software development firm in the field of web-based business performance management tools. I used my experience in business practices, legal structures and negotiation to assist both firms to reduce the effective negotiating disparity between the size of the firm and the size of the proposed clients (many large healthcare firms in one instance; many large financial and manufacturing firms in the other), and to create durable business agreements that took both party’s needs into consideration.

For both firms, I reduced the turnaround time from salesman-proposed deal to executed contract. For the first firm, I established the legal and contracting department along with its practices and policies and created and negotiated end-user, business partner and consulting contracts. I also created standardized contracts, formats, templates, attachments and responses to turn proposed deals into contracts more quickly. For the second firm, I revamped the licensing and consulting services contracts to be more customer-friendly and readable, eliminated many extraneous objections to proposed contracts and created standardized contracts, templates, formats, attachments and responses.

As an attorney in private practice, I have represented clients from various industries including healthcare, software and technology, banking, real estate, publishing and manufacturing, creating well-crafted, durable business agreements of all types.