General Business Law
Rich provides general business law counseling to client executive management and boards, and serves as general counsel for several small- and medium-size companies.
- General business counseling on IP protection/registration, federal/state/local compliance matters, litigation avoidance/management/settlement, data protection, employment, insurance, and real estate and capital leasing
- Trusted adviser and sounding board for executive management and directors on sensitive business and legal matters
- Work with management to develop acquisition and divestiture strategies
- M&A due diligence and follow-ups to confirm license rights
- Work with management to develop and refine negotiation and sales strategies
- Develop, review, and revise contract practices and contract templates
- Provide employee training on contract practices, negotiation skills, and regulatory compliance matters
- Tactical assessment and strategic recommendations for improving interplay between in-house lawyers and other employees (sales, operations, accounting) and customers
- Develop/assess data and record-retention and destruction policies
Representative Transactions
- Developed and implemented many profitable and low-risk strategic relationships with suppliers and vendors.
- Developed a profitable, low-risk global distribution model for legacy products; managed the international legal implications, negotiated the deals, and wrote the contracts. Result was a new source of license and service revenue with minimal expense and limited legal exposure.
- Devised a unique A/R collection technique that generated more than $1m cash payment, margin from a vendor, and additional sales.
- Avoided almost certain litigation with a key vendor by engineering a profitable settlement that also reduced expenses.
- Negotiated favorable settlement and go-forward license terms/fees for a client found to be in violation of an upstream supplier’s license for many years.
- Successful resolution of arbitration with upstream supplier that improperly terminated reseller agreement; led to profitable sale of existing accounts.
- Managed state ethics violation to successful resolution.
- Engaged to assess legal risk and contract practices of a growing IT consulting firm positioning itself for acquisition. Outcome was a series of written recommendations designed to:
- Improve speed-to-contract without creating additional risk for the company
- Reduce expenses and legal risk by modifying sales force accountability
- Reduce billing ambiguities, errors, and write-offs
- Create online database to manage contract observance and legal compliance
- Streamline contract templates to be more “sellable” without losing protection
- Improve relationships among sales, legal, accounting, and operations teams
- Generated benefits similar to the above in the third-party contracting area (suppliers, resellers, OEMs, etc.)
- Audited clients’ existing contracts; renegotiated contracts to reduce legal exposure and improve profitability.
- Provided contract education and negotiation skills training to clients' sales forces for many years.
- Created standard contract templates for several IT startups.
- Engaged to review existing contract templates for mature software company; consolidated three separate contract templates into one document to reduce sales barriers and speed negotiations without sacrificing any client rights.
- Assessed existing contract portfolio, created new templates, standardized contracting, reduced one-off transactions, and positioned client’s portfolio for acquisition.
