| We provide consulting services in the following areas:
Antitrust Compliance
Legal Intranets
Legal Automation
Legal Checkups
Management
Product Strategy
Strategic Planning
Acquisitions
PR/Advertising
Antitrust Compliance
Companies which violate the antitrust laws – whether as a matter of corporate policy or unintentionally – face the risk of public and private lawsuits, fines, jury awards in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and jail time for the parties involved. Even a company which successfully defends a suit may run up millions of dollars in legal fees. A lawsuit also may occupy the attention of corporate counsel and management for many months – even years – diverting them from matters more important to the company’s success.
An antitrust compliance program serves two purposes: 1) to educate a company’s employees, and alert them to the penalties for non-compliance, so that they do not violate the antitrust laws, and 2) in the event the company is sued, to reduce the penalties for non-compliance by showing that the company made a good-faith effort to comply with the law.
An antitrust compliance program may have several components, for example:
- Live training seminars targeted at in-house counsel, senior management, sales/marketing personnel, or other audiences, in person or via teleconference/videoconference to remote sites.
- Role-playing interactive simulations.
- Commercial or custom videotapes.
- Printed compliance manuals.
- On-line educational programs using the company’s intranet.
- E-mail lessons or antitrust news updates.
- Quizzes and certificates of completion.
- Databases to track compliance training.
- Wallet cards and other portable reminders of antitrust basics.
Any or all of these methods may be used depending on a company’s size, budget, geographic dispersion, risk level, etc.
We can help a company determine the best way to create a new antitrust compliance program, or make an existing program more effective. We can lead seminars, recommend videotapes or oversee the production of custom tapes, and create printed or online manuals, quizzes, wallet cards, and other written material.
Most importantly, we can help busy corporate counsel who recognize the importance of an effective compliance program but who may not have the time, resources, or subject-matter expertise to create their own programs.
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Legal Intranets
An intranet is a network within a company, generally accessible only by its employees. A legal intranet site can provide employees with answers to frequently-asked questions, training, forms, and information on compliance with antitrust, employment, and other laws. We design intranets for corporate legal departments, and for corporations without a legal department. Please see our Legal Intranets page for details.
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Legal Automation
The automation of form documents makes it easy for lawyers and non-lawyers to quickly generate custom drafts of agreements by interacting with an interview screen. By asking questions and offering options in pull-down menus and fill-in-the-blanks format, the interview screen gathers the input that is then used to select from a range of forms or clauses.
Document automation systems can guide users to the appropriate form, and then help them customize it. Document automation may be cost-effective where:
- The company generates over 25 contracts per year,
- The contracts have both standard (“boilerplate”) and custom components,
- The company wishes non-legal personnel to handle the initial drafting process, due to budget or time constraints, and/or
- The company is concerned about standardizing its contractual relationships
within acceptable parameters.
We can help a company decide if document automation is appropriate and oversee the process. We can work with a company’s existing documents or create new forms.
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Legal Checkups
A legal checkup can help a company in the following ways:
- Determine if the company is taking unacceptable legal risks in connection with antitrust compliance [link above], human resources practices, contractual procedures, etc.
- Inventory the company’s intellectual property and design strategies to maximize the return on intellectual capital.
- Evaluate existing (or potential) litigation and suggest methods for expedited and cost-effective dispute resolution.
- Improve processes for negotiating, drafting, and tracking contracts.
We can review a company’s operations and intellectual property portfolio and provide recommendations on strategies, procedures, policies, and forms.
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Management
We provide management consulting services to technology businesses in the following areas:
Product Strategy
We can help companies formulate product strategies using a process of analyzing the client’s products, the competitors’ products, the customer’s requirements, etc., and developing an understanding of how best to position the client’s products, including developing detailed messages that should be communicated to identified audiences. Suggestions for new product directions can result, as well.
Strategic Planning
We can help companies decide which businesses they should be in by mapping the company’s strengths and capabilities against identified market opportunities. We will work with the client to determine the attractiveness of different market segments, based on size, growth, competition, and match with the client’s resource base.
Acquisitions
If the strategic plan suggests an acquisition makes sense, we can work with a client to identify acquisition candidates, and do due diligence to determine whether a fit exists and what an appropriate valuation would be.
PR / Advertising
We are not a PR firm or ad agency; however, we can help manage those functions, can help select agencies to work with, and can work with clients to define the message that the marketing communications program will present to the potential customer base.
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