Practice areas
How I help businesses
Some of this work has a page of its own. The rest is set out in full below, because it is real work and not a footnote.
Areas with a page of their own
Business formation & corporate maintenance
The paperwork that decides who owns what, who decides what, and what happens when one of you wants out.
Contracts & employment matters
The agreements the business signs once it exists, and the terms on which it hires the first people who are not founders.
Debt & equity financing
Notes, SAFEs, priced rounds and credit facilities, and the cap table that has to still reconcile after every one of them.
Buying & selling a business
The transaction that reads every decision the company has made since formation, and prices the ones nobody wrote down.
Also handled here
Real estate and personal matters
Real estate work shows up on both sides of a client's life: the lease or purchase agreement behind the business, and the closing that has nothing to do with it. On the business side, a commercial lease is usually the second-largest number on a company's books, and the terms that matter are rarely the rent: the escalation clause, the assignment language that decides whether the lease survives a sale of the business, the personal guaranty that quietly outlives the entity, and the estoppel certificate a landlord will ask for at the least convenient moment of a financing.
The personal side is part of the work too. I have supported business clients with their personal needs as well, estate and real estate matters included. And whether you are a business owner or simply a person, if you need estate work in Virginia or Massachusetts, are buying a house, or want a general attorney to call first, I take those calls.
Where a matter falls outside my own focus, I have a deep bench of colleagues I have curated over the years, and a broad network to bring to the table for litigation and anything else a client may need.
Also handled here
Outside general counsel, on retainer
Most companies below a certain size do not need a general counsel and cannot ignore the work a general counsel does. What that produces is a queue: the contract that has been sitting unsigned for three weeks, the employee question nobody wants to put in writing, the vendor agreement that renews automatically on the fourteenth. None of it is urgent until exactly one of them is.
A standing monthly arrangement changes the arithmetic. You stop deciding whether a question is worth a phone call, which is the decision that causes most of the damage, because the cheapest version of any legal problem is the one raised before it has a shape. Scope is agreed in advance, revisited when the business changes, and ended when it stops being worth the money.
What it is not is an insurance policy against litigation, or a promise of unlimited availability. It is a defined amount of ongoing counsel at a predictable cost, sized for a company that has real legal exposure and no reason to carry a full-time lawyer.
Also handled here
Business disputes and litigation
Most business disputes are contract disputes with a relationship attached, and whether one is worth litigating is a business decision before it is a legal one. That deserves an honest answer early — including when the honest answer is that the cost of being right exceeds the value of being right. Where a matter can be closed by a letter or a renegotiation, that is worth trying first.
That same practicality carries into the matters that do end up in litigation. I take the call, and if it isn't work I should be doing myself, I'll tell you who is.
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If your question sits outside every heading on this page, say so. The first conversation is free, and if the answer is that you want a different kind of lawyer, that is the answer you will get.