Doesn’t it make sense that your business attorney should have extensive business experience?  What is a “General Counsel” and why do successful San Diego businesses and corporations hire the Watkins Firm to serve in this capacity?

Consider the professional or Olympic athlete.  They are in the prime of their life, and are at the pinnacle of fitness, training, skill and preparedness.  They are among the highest paid and/or skilled professionals in the world.  They still need coaching.  Why?  Effective coaches help them to continue to expand their understanding of the game, and their role within it.  They help the professional to avoid or overcome traps and challenges that would defeat or sideline lesser players.  Effective coaches develop strategies to exploit their player’s strengths and shield their weaknesses (yes, every one of them has areas of weakness).  Effective coaches teach them to draw upon the strengths of others on their team, and help them to work together to achieve the greatest of victories.

Your business attorney should have extensive business experience and the Watkins Firm has over 40+ years of experience serving the business, science and tech, real estate and medical / healthcare communities here in San Diego and across California.

The model of a professional coach is very similar to what we often do for our business clients as their general counsel.  We are experienced.  Battle hardened.  Street wise.  Business Savvy.  We understand business and the ingredients that separate those companies that survive and thrive from those who fail in the first 3 years.  As your general counsel, we help you to understand the fundamentals of business more thoroughly and completely.  We advise you against the pitfalls and potential hazards along the way.  We help you to understand your role, and the roles of all those you will attract to work with you.  We guide you each step of the way as a valued coach and counselor.  Yes, we help with every legal issue including business disputes and litigation.  More importantly, we coach you along the way to help you avoid disputes before they ever arise, resolve internal or external disputes quickly and efficiently, and work to position you to increase the speed and breadth of your business success.

Pro-Tip: “After 35 years of doing this and after thousands of different companies, a lawyer tends to know more about how to run a business than most people would expect. We go to college for seven years, but we learned our whole career from other people’s mistakes and other people’s successes. And so the three core things that I’ve come away with is if you’re going to have a business, you should have an experienced business attorney. You should have a banker (source of finances) and you should have a CPA. Most people are kind of clueless about what a CPA does, not for taxes but for advising you on how to be profitable.

This is about a lot more than just a contract, or helping to pick the right entity. This is about where their business is going to go. It’s about the journey. When they come in, they tell us the story and we ask them questions about what kind of business this is going to be – we want to know from a lawyer’s perspective. Is this a high risk business? Is this a trending business? Is this a highly regulated business, those kind of things. So we can advise. And then we ask about other things and what they’re doing and just to get a gauge on how sophisticated they are or how unsophisticated they are so we can help.

We help them to understand how to structure a business so that if they need to bring people in down the road, it’s set up to do that. Or more importantly, how’s this all going to end? Exit strategy. We talk about all of that. We talk about one year, five year, 10 year plans. We just try to get a feel for where they’re going, what their game plan is. And if they don’t have a game plan, we tell them how other companies have done it and give them a menu of things that they might want to think about.

We help develop corporate documents and strategies to prevent disputes before they ever happen.  In the end, nobody fights unless there’s money to be made or lost. And if you have an agreement that identifies what everybody’s rights and obligations are ahead of time, then you won’t have a fight because everybody will know. But if there’s no agreement, or you’re using some boilerplate from a downloaded form, then you’re going on people’s understanding. And when money is involved, emotions are involved and they’re understanding changes to fit what they want.  But if we’ve helped our clients with a well-crafted agreement there, that’s already covered all these ‘what ifs,’ then their emotions won’t run wild and they’ll realize they’ll be bound by what they agreed to before. And so you’ll end up without a big, disruptive, expensive dispute.” – Dan Watkins, Founding Partner

If you are looking for an experienced business lawyer and/or business coach, and believe your business attorney should have extensive business experience then we invite you to review our podcast Episode 19 – Your Business Attorney is a Valuable Business Partner as well as the strong recommendations of our clients and contact the Watkins Firm or call 858-535-1511 for a complimentary consultation today.

Business is an exciting and profitable adventure.  How much more could you accomplish with the help of a world class coach?