Corporate

Our corporate attorneys provide expert, results oriented counseling that helps our clients navigate through legal obstacles to reach their goals. Committed to forming and maintaining longstanding client relationships, we familiarize ourselves with each client organization and advise on virtually every aspect of their business operations. We have built our business legal counsel on a solid understanding of each company’s concerns, goals and day-to-day operations. By teaming with our clients, we are able to devise solutions that add value to and strengthen the foundations of their companies.

Our experienced attorneys provide dedicated, quality service with a proven track record of skillful execution in all types of business transactions, from the routine to the complex. We do more than just inform clients; we provide practical tools for action and detailed solutions to the range of issues our business clients face. We counsel our clients on tax issues, how to protect their intellectual property and we represent them in litigation. Our interdisciplinary approach provides clients with solutions to a vast range of business problems.

Representative transactions of our business practice:

• Formation of business entities, including corporations, limited liability companies, general and limited partnerships

• Drafting and/or negotiation of contracts with suppliers, distributors, customers and others

• Operational issues

• Compensation plans, including equity-based incentives

• Venture capital and private equity financing

• IPOs, public company filings and stockholder relations

• Mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures

• Public company regulatory requirements

• Unfair competition

• Business tax and estate planning

• Protection of intellectual and proprietary rights

• Licensing matters

• Technology, multi-media and communications law

• Internet and e-commerce law

• Strategic partnership or joint venture agreements

• Family business succession

• Recapitalizations

Mergers and Acquisitions

Walton & Walton’s knowledgeable and highly skilled M&A attorneys handle sophisticated transactions nationally and globally. Our clients include small privately held businesses, private equity firms and multi-national corporations whom we advise on M&A transactions, including mergers, purchases and sales of stock and assets, management buyouts, leveraged buyouts, going private transactions, recapitalizations, spin-off dispositions, and other corporate restructurings. We also advise bidders, target companies, investment bankers, financial advisors and many others that participate in M&A transactions.

Our clients’ goals are always our primary consideration. To that end, we employ a vast range of acquisition structures and forms of consideration, working through the many subtle and often conflicting layers of complexity that typify these transactions.

Start-ups, Emerging Companies and Venture Capital

Gifted strategists with personal knowledge of our client’s business, our attorneys bring a unique understanding to the challenges start-up and emerging companies face. The issues range from choice of jurisdiction, capital requirements and financing structure to securities law compliance and potential exit strategies. We are expert at organizing, structuring and documenting all forms of legal entities throughout the United States, be they corporations, partnerships, joint ventures, limited liability companies or limited liability partnerships.

Our representation goes beyond the immediate corporate needs. We bring in other members of the firm’s team of attorneys to evaluate tax issues, IP issues and the like, to assess areas of strength or weakness. We carry out employment audits, review employment agreements and plans, evaluate angel financings, venture capital financings, equipment financing and joint development arrangements; audit patent, copyright, trademark and licensing matters, structure joint ventures and strategic partnerships and follow through to mergers, acquisitions, IPOs and liquidity fundings.

Joint Ventures and Strategic Alliances

When it comes to structuring and negotiating joint ventures and strategic alliances, Walton & Walton attorneys are well versed in the many forms those unique associations can take—corporations, LLCs, LLPs, or contractual enterprises—and their many purposes from product acquisition or distribution, to market penetration and risk sharing. We have prepared myriad related ancillary agreements, such as marketing, distribution, license and supply agreements—each with an understanding of the client’s goals

Private Companies and Family-Owned Business

Our attorneys have been teaming with clients for decades, providing legal counsel at all stages of their growth and evolution, helping them meet the many legal challenges and decisions they have faced. Our clients are engaged in a diverse global economy governed by complex laws and regulations and they trust us as advisers and business partners because we are involved in their world. They rely on our forward-thinking to help them resolve problems before they arise. This has engendered client loyalty, and the firm has grown from that loyalty.

We believe it is critical to understand and address the full range of needs and goals of the family owned and private companies we represent. Our attorneys have earned the confidence of generations of clients. We have decades of trust and estate counseling experience, and have the skill and discretion to handle even the most sensitive and complex matters. We also represent owners of new and emerging companies. These clients, as a group, generally have issues that are unique to entrepreneurs. We are often called upon to be innovators; to fashion creative legal solutions to some of life’s most difficult challenges.