General Counsel Services for Small to Medium Businesses
The business and corporate attorneys at Brown & Charbonneau, LLP provide high quality, tailored and effective General Counsel services for small to medium sized businesses throughout Southern California. For those companies that are a bit too small to hire a full time attorney to act as General Counsel, we provide this service through a number of cost saving programs to suit your needs. Our General Counsel packages range from as low as $1500 to $10,000 per month for our most complete package. The range in services depends upon the type and extent of the client’s legal needs. Each package provides legal counsel at a significantly reduced rates from the traditional hourly rates.
With this service, you have access to skilled business and corporate lawyers to address all sorts of legal and business needs. These include:
- Emerging companies and business formation
- Assist and attend Board of Directors meetings
- Corporate and business governance and compliance
- Contract preparation and negotiation
- Consulting, Distributing, Manufacturing and other business agreements
- Business planning and strategy
- Intellectual property issues (trademark, copyright, patent & trade secrets)
- Risk management consultation and advice
- Non-competition agreements
- Protecting trade secrets and confidential information
- Human resource and employment related issues
- Insurance related issues
- Licensing, regulatory and legal compliance matters
- Litigation services or monitoring of outside litigation counsel
- Real Estate and Construction related issues
An experienced Southern California business and corporate attorney can provide prompt and effective legal counsel for your business. Brown & Charbonneau, LLP’s General Counsel attorneys can provide immediate and invaluable assistance to any business. To find out more about our General Counsel programs, give us a call at 714-505-3000 or contact us online today to speak with a member of our legal team.
Definition of General Counsel by Wikipedia
A general counsel, chief counsel or chief legal officer (CLO) is the chief lawyer of a legal department, usually in a company or a governmental department.
In a company, the person holding the position typically reports directly to the CEO, and their duties involve overseeing and identifying the legal issues in all departments and their interrelation, including engineering, design, marketing, sales, distribution, credit, finance, human resources, production, as well as corporate governance and business policy. This would naturally require in most cases reporting directly to the owner or CEO overseeing the very business on which the CLO is expected to be familiar with and advise on the most confidential level. This requires the CLO/general counsel to work closely with each of the other officers, and their departments, to appropriately be aware and advise.[1]
Historically, general counsel often handled administrative tasks while outside lawyers in private practice handled more complex legal work. Since the 1980s, however, the general counsel position has become increasingly prominent in multinational companies, often directly advising the board of directors in place of outside lawyers. General counsel are now often among the most highly paid executives of major American corporations, and prominent American government lawyers and law firm partners are often hired for general counsel roles at prominent companies. Similar trends are also being seen in the United Kingdom and other countries.[2]
General counsel often have broad roles encompassing crisis management, compliance reporting management and public policy advocacy. Many companies also hire in-house counsel to handle specialized tasks such as tax work, mergers and acquisitions, labor law and intellectual property, sometimes building in-house practice groups that rival the practices of major law firms.[2]
For information for Outside General Counsel Services, click here
If you need assistance with any area of Business Law, contact the experts at Brown & Charbonneau, LLP for a consultation: 714-505-3000