General Corporate/M&A Matters

Attorneys are often mocked for what seems to outsiders as excessive caution in making definitive statements.  A typical legal opinion rendered by a corporate attorney is approximately 10% opinion and 90% caveats, exclusions and limitations.  The one caveat I think I have provided to every single one of my clients at one time or another is “but I’m not a tax attorney and am not providing tax advice.”  Even though I took courses in basic income tax and corporate tax in law school, this area of the law is uniquely complex, and I’ve always been careful to defer to the experts.  My uncle got an LLM degree in tax law and practiced in the areas of tax, corporate, real estate and trusts and estates.  That sort of generalization isn’t really possible anymore, as all of those areas are exponentially more complex today, so most corporate lawyers today are like me very reticent about making grand pronouncements about tax matters.

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Seeking Tax Legal AdviceRead More »

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in their usual form are done in a single closing.  Sometimes there is some delay between signing the definitive agreement and closing, and sometimes it is simultaneous, but the closing itself is typically a singular event.  From the buyer’s perspective, unless the buyer is huge and the purchase price small, it is a large risk to take on an entire company at once.  To be sure, M&A attorneys have developed strategies to mitigate risk, including conducting due diligence before closing, but sometimes target company problems only become apparent after the buyer owns the company, even after a thorough due diligence investigation.  And post-closing purchase price adjustment mechanisms do not always fully compensate the buyer for these problems.

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Staged M&ARead More »