CORPORATE COUNSELING: DESCRIPTION
The primary objective of lawyers in our Corporate department is to become a trusted advisor to the businesses they represent. Our lawyers strive to understand and be sensitive to the objectives of the business and the challenges faced by our clients in achieving their goals. We understand that in order to provide the most valuable counsel to our clients we must combine our legal experience and expertise with an insight into our clients' businesses.
MLA lawyers have extensive experience in providing counseling to our clients on a variety of corporate matters, ranging from day-to-day corporate governance considerations to formulation and implementation of innovative corporate structures, strategies and transactions to meet our clients' business objectives.
We provide our clients with advice across the entire spectrum of corporate matters, including:
- Benefits plans
- Business formation and organization
- Commercial contracts
- Debt and equity financing and investments
- Dissolutions and liquidations
- Executive contracts and compensation
- Foreign qualifications
- Non-competition and non-disclosure agreements
- Recapitalizations and reorganizations
- Regulatory compliance
- Shareholders meetings
- Stock splits, dividends and redemptions
We also counsel senior management and directors on complex governance matters, such as conflict of interest issues, board and management relationships, directors' fiduciary duties, special committee composition and operation, anti-takeover defenses and compliance with securities laws and regulations. At the present time, and particularly since the passage of the Sabanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the related changes to the listing requirements of the principal stock exchanges, we have counseled our corporate clients, especially our public company clients, on all aspects of governance and compliance these changes and the current corporate environment entail. We describe this part of our practice in the section entitled Corporate Governance and Compliance.
Also critical to our success in ensuring that our clients' needs are met is the ability of our corporate lawyers to coordinate and ensure the efficient delivery of legal services from various practice areas and disciplines. In this role, our corporate lawyers monitor the provision of all legal services required by a client, including areas such as litigation, financial restructuring, bankruptcy, public policy and real estate.