Many business owners and professionals are not sure how to select a San Diego business attorney.  After more than four decades of service to the San Diego business community the Watkins Firm is prepared to help answer any question, solve any problem or challenge, provide insight into how to best leverage an opportunity, or share how we have helped countless businesses just like yours to get into business, and not just survive, but thrive!

Important Things to Look for in a California Business Attorney:

• Experience.  Look for extensive experience in your company’s field or vertical market(s).
• The ability to provide all legal services including formation, contracts, dispute management and resolution, employer defense and counsel (California is the most challenging state in which to be an employer), as well as someone who will take your call without charging you for it in order to learn what you are facing and help to determine next steps.
• A proven, proprietary library of existing business contract and transactional documents that can be tailored to meet your specific needs.  Download forms are generic, boilerplate.  You want the same cost-effectiveness but at a competitive rate.

What is the Role of Your Business Attorney?

Your business attorney should be one of your best and closest business advisers.  They should have extensive experience in all phases of business formation and operations.  You want to select a San Diego business attorney who can help you to navigate every opportunity from start up and the first few years of business to hiring quality employees as well as fulfilling the complex responsibilities and requirements of a California employer.  You will need efficient guidance at each step of the process as you learn all that is required to fulfill your duties and legal responsibilities as an employer.  Employee disputes including wage and hour challenges and PAGA actions are one of the leading sources of business litigation and your business attorney should help to prevent disputes before they ever have the opportunity to arise.

The Importance of Proven Business Contracts

Contracts are the foundation of all business and business transactions.  Efficient and effective business contracts are one of the key areas of competence to look for in a San Diego business attorney.  Ask a potential legal partner about the extent of their contract development success as it relates to your specific business.  The Watkins Firm maintains an extensive, proprietary, battle-tested library of proven contracts, checklist and transactional documents.  We don’t have to create anything from scratch.  We are able to custom-tailor a contract to meet your unique and specific requirements.

You’ll want to select a San Diego business attorney who is an experienced business litigation attorney as well?  The experience of resolving business to business disputes and business litigation actually informs and strengthens contract creation.  We apply all we’ve learned across the decades to create well crafted and tightly structured contracts which guide the relationship or transaction to a successful completion.  Why should you select a San Diego business attorney with proven dispute resolution experience?  Because it’s not a matter of “if,” it’s a matter of “when.”  If you are successful in your business, and it is making money, disputes are unfortunately going to be a part of the equation.

Asset Purchase and Stock Purchase Transactions

Another issue to consider when deciding how to select a San Diego business attorney is the likelihood of acquiring the assets of another company through an asset purchase or stepping into the shoes of existing owners through a stock purchase.  These complex mergers and acquisitions transactions are fraught with potential risk as well as genuine reward.  The proven San Diego business attorneys at the Watkins Firm have decades of experience in these transactions.  We help to accomplish the deal you are pursuing while providing sound advice and counsel to help eliminate or mitigate risk and increase the opportunities for success.

Pro-Tip: “Well, if we’re forming them, then we help them select the right kind of company with their goals in mind, Or if they’re merging or if they’re buying and selling, that’s different. We don’t have to do entity selection. We don’t have to choose between what kind of entity. There is already something, but we give them advice on whether they should change or how to expand it or what they can and can’t do with their company. If they’re in the merger and acquisition stage, then it’s a whole different list of things we’re going to talk to them about and work them up, get them set and ready to go to do the best they can.

Every company has contracts when they first come to see us. We don’t want to do a full dental exam on them. We’re just going to address what’s going on and get some background. Because once our lawyers here get background on a company, know generally what they’re doing, then we’re ready for any kind of questions they may have. We don’t want to fix anything that’s not broken. We don’t want to go in there and say, you need to do this. You’re doing this all wrong. No, if they’re making a profit, they’re doing it all right. And if there’s something they’re concerned about, we’ll help them address it. But any of the main issues, responsibilities and risks as an employer, business, commercial contracts, all those will lead us to general background. And that means they don’t have to teach us or pay us to learn their general background for any questions they have in the future. We’ll get that at the first consultation. We’ll know what’s going on. And so if they come back and say, okay, you just handled my consumer or my lease or my independent contractor agreements, I got this other issue. We won’t have to say, oh, I need a couple hours of your time to get to know what you do.

We just know you have a business relationship with your business lawyer who knows you. And if you have a problem, our clients gives us a quick call or shoot us an email and they get an answer. And that’s why it’s so much less expensive than not. And then having trouble and having people try to get in and undo mistakes that you might’ve made because they’re not an attorney, they can get in deeper instead of taking the right steps to dig out.  That’s why we like the whole business relationship thing.  We’re battle tested and battle crunched, I mean the law’s changing every year.

So every company we help to start, every agreement we do, every transaction we do, we have a database filled with those types of transactions. And if you go year by year, you end up with a database that’s more specific to different types of situations. So we have that resource and we combine that with a very expensive research library that we keep and we pay for with several different sources so that we can take our, because every agreement we do has got to be an original for the contract.

And you’ll sleep better at night knowing when you have the right business attorney. If you get a good one, it’ll be the best decision you ever made.” – Dan Watkins, Founding Partner

Select a San Diego Business Attorney with a Proven Track Record of Success

Now you know a little more about how to choose a San Diego business attorney.  Look for extensive experience across a broad range of services and skills.  Your business attorney should have extensive experience while remaining cost-effective and responsive while providing the sound business counsel you need. We invite you to review our podcast Episode 38 – What is a General Counsel as well as the strong recommendations of our clients and contact the Watkins Firm or call 858-535-1511 for a complimentary consultation today.