Business Advocacy | Corporate Lawyer | Why Choose Business Law

Business Advocacy

When discussing business advocacy, the first question that comes to mind is: which business advocacy are you talking about? Business advocacy is as varied as companies are. It varies according to the size, the industry, the level of complexity of the company, and many other factors that are as varied as economic activities.

Lawyer For Large Companies

The lawyer for large companies will be focused on risk and process management; it will take care to plan its internal regulatory movements and monitor its activities in all its departments. It will be, above all, a lawyer who will seek to measure and parameterize the efficiency of the legal solutions found, be they contracts, tax, labor, environmental planning, and many other sectors where the company suffers exposures and risks, and in turn outlines strategies and makes decisions of conducts, whose effectiveness needs to be measured and confirmed, for improvement or change of strategy.

Lawyer For Smaller Companies

In smaller companies, on the other hand, the lawyer who acts with corporate law starts to function more and more like a business advisor, offering even the same risk assessments, but without the complexity of the methods and language of the large company. The less complex company, with fewer hierarchical levels and less compartmentalization of decisions - one or a few owners- can be interpreted legally in a less formal way. The efficiency confirmation works have fewer parameters to be implemented.

Corporate Business Law Professionals

The professional incorporates business law; however, he must understand well the activity of his client and his internal organization, whether in the large company, whether in the medium, small, or even in the still incipient company. A company is a center of legal relations - labor, contracts, taxes, environmental, banking, institutional; in short, it is an economic complex where the lawyer must assess the risks at each stage and relate to the other aspects of the company. When examining a contract, you must correlate it with labor and tax risks, for example.

The business lawyer must know certain peculiarities of the economic process, such as the concept of transaction costs, to properly formulate the processes for entering into contracts, tax planning, relationships with suppliers and workers.

It is not conceived for corporate law professionals who do not know corporate law, possibly not in their legal filigrees, which can be an addition of quality to their competence, but, indispensably, the functions and economic consequences and instances of power, of the different corporate types and their variations, to masterfully adapt the conditions of the company's reality, considering corporate structure, the business sector, the company's external relationships with banks, suppliers, public authorities, and other economic actors.

Business Advocacy: The skills the professional needs to develop

Besides, it is necessary to understand how and what the function of forming groups of companies is for the strategy of commercial and tax operation, without this strategy constituting a mechanism of tax or labor fraud.

Coupled with this technique of corporate structuring comes the versatility in regulating relations between companies, with typical commercial relationship contracts, such as company, representation, contract, subcontract, transport, storage, and others, in addition to their variations and impact assessment, some contracts concerning others.

It is also necessary - and this is increasingly required of business law professionals - to know the current mechanisms for company meetings and economic efforts, such as joint ventures, partnerships, hybrid companies, special purpose companies, investment funds, relational and communion contracts scope.

There is no way to work with corporate law currently and not be inserted in the society where the risks come from information and its non-protection. Thus, contracts for confidentiality, protection of knowledge, the discipline of information, compartmentalization and organized dissemination of information, non-competition and quarantines, besides, of course, clear notions of intellectual property (not only trademarks and patents but also contractual forms of protection of commercial and industrial secrecy), are increasingly required competencies of modern company lawyers.

Also, care and attention to establish preventive protocols and procedures to minimize the risks of the operation, such as internal and external liability chains - subcontracting, custom manufacturing, branding by suppliers, with possible damage to the company's intangibles (brand, image), are expected tasks of the lawyer specialized in corporate law.

For companies that deal with the end consumer, a whole framework of risk and cost assessment in the pre-contractual (including offer and advertising), contractual and post-contractual phases, including product and/or service defects, is a major theme and a source of risk and accountability of the company in constant mutation, so that the attention of the lawyer must also be focused on these issues, with a legal bias and at the same time focused on the feasible solution of the problems arising from it.

Those who work in corporate law also need to know financing and refinancing instruments, renegotiation and debt restructuring, as well as the indispensable diversity of mechanisms for contract imbalance and rebalancing, excessive burden.

The professional in business law must also be prepared to be one is a leading and strategic negotiator for the company, as there is no doubt that this will be the most prominent role that he will be able to play for his client, over time - perhaps more than a simple provider of legal responses.

For this, he must be well prepared, know the negotiation techniques and their possible scenarios, and have a calm and rational view of the negotiation plan, which many times the client does not have. For that, he must dominate both the negotiation with his client - the so-called behind the table negotiation, where the lawyer will offer the client the options he considers most viable for reaching an agreement, that is, the concessions that the client must do so that they are accepted by the other party, and those he understands can be obtained from the other side.

For that, the lawyer who works in corporate law needs to be intimately familiar with the company, its strategic strongholds, its operation, and the purpose of that negotiation, as well as - which is not negligible - the ways of negotiating with the decision-maker within the company.

The company, this is all necessary for your work as a negotiator with the other party - in the negotiation stage across the table - to be effective and understand the whole conflict. This is a modern role for the company lawyer, where his knowledge of techniques and strategies for negotiating not only conflicts, It is worth focusing a little more attention on this topic.

The well-trained lawyer familiar with the firm can even transform distributive negotiations into integrative ones. In those, the parties dispute a certain amount (payment x loss), and the central negotiation is a competition for the higher value or, the larger fraction of the value. Thus, those who may want to pay less, to keep most of the amount they did not have to pay, and those who receive want to receive more, to leave with the other party a smaller fraction than could have been received.

One side gains more, as the other loses, and what is disputed is just the amount of advantage within a value that the parties previously determined. Here, one side wins at the expense of the other, and the negotiation tends to be asymmetrical concerning the information, with many reservations from one to the other. This is the role that was reserved for the traditional lawyer, an administrator of conflicts and antagonistic positions on one side concerning the other.

But the lawyer can become an agent of integrative negotiation, which is one in which the result is greater than the positions of the parties: instead of disputing a previously fixed amount, the parties can ally themselves - and this despite the conflict - to obtain mutual benefits together.

It will be up to the business advocate to offer creative options for the possible benefits. It is one in which the parties cooperate to obtain the maximum possible benefits, combining their interests in an agreement. Such cases imply the creation and equitable distribution of value. It is about expanding the spectrum of choices, enriching the opportunities for trade-offs, and observing more widely the opportunity costs of these choices - for example, to attach importance to the long-term relationships between those involved.

In addition to simply obtaining an advantage, business law can and should contribute to helping the other side without excessive concessions and seeking to have the other side do the same, almost always expanding the spectrum of negotiation and discovering other opportunities for mutual concessions and resulting advantages.

Modern Business Lawyer

Finally, the modern business lawyer must implement a conciliation model and mentality in the company to be chaired or approved by the Judiciary, demonstrating the comparative advantages of negotiation and establishing the limits for each case.

The lawyer specialized in corporate business law will also have a fundamental role in the so-called decision in an uncertain environment. Making decisions when there is no total access and control of information and the way to do it with the maximum possible rationality - and consequently allocating risk with precision are essential tasks in the company's strategic decisions, for which the modern lawyer will be indispensable.

Corporate Lawyer

The corporate lawyer has a fundamental role in measuring and offering the level of contingency necessary for the risks of all operations in the company. The immobilization of resources derived from contingency is a very difficult decision and must be based on very solid arguments. The updated company lawyer must have mechanisms so that the contingency can be rationally measured and justified, whether in the quantification of the risk - what is the origin and how much the exposure is worth - or in the assessment of its severity - the probability of it happening.

The lawyer who works in corporate law is also the main implementer and supervisor of compliance conduct within companies. No company today can fail to pay specific attention to compliance with all laws and regulations, both external and internal - which can be even stricter than internal and external legislative regulations.

Today, compliance, far from being considered as exclusively cost for the company, as was imagined years ago, is an important, if not the main, support of the company's image in the market. Even a company with quality and price will find it difficult to maintain long-term contracts with other companies in the market if it does not demonstrate a proactive attitude towards compliance and transparency of this compliance about the conduct of compliance with the rules of the sector - also because the economy of costs derived from not complying with the law is a perverse economy, which turns the company that gains competitiveness in this way into an unfair competitor.

The Role Of The Corporate and Modern Business Lawyer

The role of the corporate lawyer in the negotiation and management of projects is essential, as the incorrect assessment of risk leads to exposure of the company or an increase in the cost of the operation. The lawyer can be a lawyer “in house,” or his role can be fulfilled by an external lawyer. Or even a combination of internal legal and outsourcing, which is more common, as companies generate more complex and complex legal demands.

The modern business lawyer must be prepared not to be seen as a cost but as a generator of efficiency. For this, it needs to be formed far beyond merely dogmatic legal knowledge. You need to know the company and the company's management and know-how to reason more and more as an administrator and economist, equate security and efficiency, cost and return of the operation, and become an essential component in the organization of the companies.