Several weeks ago, I had the occasion to speak to a business colleague of mine who is a marketing specialist. In that discussion, I was asked to explain Goodman Law’s practice involving start-up enterprises and the sorts of services that it provided.  I tried to describe the process of serving entrepreneurs by helping them develop strategies, refine their business plans, and, in general, fulfill the function of legal “go to” person. I tried to describe that the kind of services provided to “new” business clients demanded that I be familiar with a number of legal areas, including corporate law, intellectual property law, employment law, immigration law and a number of other practice areas.  While I struggled to define exactly what I did, my colleague, probably somewhat exasperated by my long-winded explanation, blurted out, “so you do business development law.”  I said to her that I had never heard the term coined to describe a legal discipline, but that promoting business development was essentially the core of the practice area.

Since that day, I have thought a great deal about “Business Development Law”: what it was, whether it was a legal discipline at all, and whether it had the potential of emerging into a significant legal area. First, Business Development Law per se is unlike securities law, trademark law or immigration law in that it does not arise from a cognizable body of law, but rather seems to describe an analysis applied to the almost evolutionary process of institution building that can, and should go on, within a business enterprise.  Second, it also seemed to me that, by its very nature, Business Development Law necessarily involved a multidisciplinary approach to problem solving.  I considered for a moment that many general counsels to companies emerged from highly specialized legal areas, like trademark and patent law, or corporate/securities law, or insurance defense.  On the whole, I was not familiar  with a practice area that seemed to emphasize integration of bodies of legal knowledge over specialization.

Indeed, a fair observation that I think can be made is that since the 1970’s, lawyers have become more in the way of specialists. According to one of my older bar colleagues, it used to be that a lawyer had to be a jack of all trades: one day drafting a will, the next day doing a trademark search,  the third day advancing an opening statement to  a jury in a personal injury trial.  But by the 1980’s, “general practice” was becoming “old hat”: The mantra became: “when in trouble, call in the specialist.”  The problem, however, confronted by “new’ businesses in the current, far more difficult, economic climate, is that “calling in the specialist” is going to be an increasingly expensive affair and may not, in fact, be what is needed: In fact, what new businesses may need are not specialists at all, but generalists, who can solve problems involving a variety of different legal areas and in a cost-effective manner.

For those of us who have been fortunate enough to have acquired experience in several practice areas, this means that we can offer clients a multi-disciplinary–even holistic– legal approach.  An example of this linkage between practice areas is exemplified in the practice of immigration law, which is a type of law that can intersect with several other specialty areas, such as employment law, corporate law, export law, human rights law and even national security law.  This quality about immigration law, however, only becomes apparent when one knows something about these other related practice areas. For example, under certain circumstances, disclosing to a foreign national information deemed by the U.S. Government to constitute “sensitive” information under the national security laws not only can can create visa issues but may implicate export law regulations that would apply to such disclosure of information.   In this sense, businesses development law requires the practitioner to approach a problem from many different vantage points, with the goal of identifying and managing the legal risks of developing a new business venture.

In addition to these tasks, the business development lawyer can also play an important advisory role by emphasizing the significance of creating an enterprise endowed with its own legal personality and standing.  This psychological role is, in fact, the foundation of the business development lawyer’s contribution to creating a company ethos that identifies the welfare of the company as being the ultimate goal behind the legal controls that need to be formulated and implemented.  In this respect, the failure of general counsels to view their work as integral to the business development process has been at least one reason why there have been so many instances where lawyers have poorly served the corporations they have been charged to defend.  As such, although there is no well-integrated body of business development law, the area does offer up a uniquely interdisciplinary and ethically grounded analysis that makes the attorney not so much a tool, but an advisor, who can play an important role in devising policies that can enhance the “new” enterprise’s over-all prospects for business success.

Tags: Business Development Law, business plans, corporate law, employment law, enterprises, entrepreneurs, immigration law, intellectual property law, practice areas, start-up

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Business Development Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.