Your experienced San Diego business attorney at Watkins Firm is a valuable partner at every step in your business career. From the formation of your company through acquisitions, to effective and enforceable contracts, advice as an employer and business dispute resolution your business lawyer should be one of your most trusted business advisors.
3 Key Takeaways Regarding the Selection of Your Experienced San Diego Business Attorney at Watkins Firm:
- Look for extensive experience in your industry in a business attorney. Your business attorney should become a valuable advisor and trusted source whenever you have a question, challenge, or opportunity.
- Being a California employer is one of the most challenging aspects of business in our state. California highly regulates all aspects of employment, and plaintiffs lawyers are constantly pursuing lawsuits, class actions and California PAGA lawsuits against San Diego and California employers. You’ll need a business attorney who is also an experienced, proven employer defense attorney.
- Transactions are the essence of business. Contracts, advice, dispute resolution, and sound counsel ensure continuous and profitable business transactions.
- Your San Diego and California business law firm should be able to handle any aspect of business, from formation through mergers and acquisitions, contracts through dispute management and resolution, preparation and support as an employer to corporate governance and compliance.
One of the Most Valuable Members of Your Business Team
Your experienced San Diego business attorney at Watkins Firm has almost four decades of experience in all aspects of business here in San Diego and throughout California. Draw on our 40+ years of experience serving the business, science and tech, real estate and medical / healthcare communities here in San Diego and across California. We are small business owners ourselves. We have extensive experience in most types of businesses and you can draw upon that insight to avoid the pitfalls which have set back or closed other companies and increase the rate of your business’ successful growth and profitability. Business involves a solid plan that considers every aspect of the opportunities and challenges in front of you. The implementation and constant updating of your vision directs the actions you take as a business owner and employer.
Business Formation, Mergers and Acquisitions
Your experienced San Diego business attorney at Watkins Firm is a valuable partner as you form your company and as you expand through mergers and acquisitions along the way. Ask about our services and supporting contracts and due diligence checklists for any stock purchase, asset purchase or membership interest purchase transaction. The selection of your original entity is based upon a series of factors from the type of ownership structure to the nature of the business you intend to conduct as well as where you are going to operate.
Acquisitions through a stock purchase or asset purchase are strong opportunities to expand the resources of your organization and the ability of your company to reach into new vertical or geographical markets. These steps are full of both risk and opportunity. Your Watkins Firm business attorney works with you to minimize risk exposure while helping you and your company to make the right decisions at each step of the way.
The Right Lawyer for any California Employer
The experienced wage and hour and employer defense attorneys at the Watkins Firm have advised California and San Diego employers and corporate clients for over four decades. California is the toughest state in the union in which to be an employer. We have more federal, state, and local laws, regulations, and ordinances than anywhere else in the nation. California has even devised its own Private Attorneys General Act or PAGA to allow workers to go after those who employ them on behalf of the State of California.
Transactions are the Essence of Business and Contracts are the Essence of a Transaction
Successful transactions are the essence of business. Your company will have transactions with individual people and other business entities. Your business will involve deals with suppliers, customers and employees alike. Each of these important relationships will be governed by a contract. The quality of your business contracts will have a profound impact on the success and profitability of your all your business transactions.
Your experienced San Diego business attorney at Watkins Firm is a valuable partner who understands the concepts of “utility” and ensuring that you maximize the return on every dollar. We have developed an extensive, proprietary proven contract library over our nearly four decades of experience in California business relationships, transactions, due diligence, and corporate documents. These are proven contracts which are constantly updated to reflect changes in federal, state and local laws. They are battle tested and do not need to be created from scratch. This would be far to costly and time-consuming. We custom tailor a proven contract to meet the specific and unique needs and requirements of your company and the business need at hand.
Contracts are the essence of a transaction. They guide the parties through the relationship or “benefit of the bargain” at hand, anticipate potential challenges along the way and provide a road map to guide the parties to a successful and profitable conclusion.
Dispute Management, Representation, and Successful Resolution
If you are in business you are going to encounter disputes. It’s not a matter of “if,” it’s a matter of “when.” You’ll need a proven dispute resolution attorney to answer your questions, provide sound counsel, and resolve little problems and challenges before they become substantial disputes. We’ve represented clients in every size matter from a small negotiation between two partners, to disputes between LLC members or corporate shareholders, to successful outcomes in nationally covered trials involving large employers and business interests and huge sums of money.
Ask about our unique strategy specifically designed to resolve business disputes quickly and in a cost-effective manner. The Watkins Firm is actually able to resolve the vast majority of our client’s disputes through effective leveraged negotiation. This is the least expensive, most productive and fastest strategy for resolving any business litigation or dispute. We also manage the filing of and/or response to a lawsuit, settlement conferences, business mediation, arbitration, and representation of our clients in a trial of any matter regardless of the scope or amount of exposure.
Pro-Tip: “We have of course, very knowledgeable attorneys, but we also have a higher percentage of support staff, paralegals, administrators in house, HR people so that when our clients have a basic question about employment practices and they don’t want to spend the high attorney rate, they can contact one of our administrators or one of our paralegals and ask a question, cost them a lot less money. And everybody here has been working on these cases for years and years. So the knowledge might not be at the fingertips of the employer, but we answer that same question every week for one of our clients.
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. 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’ve had clients for decades. And when our clients do well, our attorneys feel like they’re doing well outside of whether they’re getting paid a whole bunch of money or not or fees or anything. We have long term clients. And our attorneys really feel good when things turn out for them because, on the litigation side, they go through stress and we go through stress. And when we resolve a dispute and our clients are happy, we’re happy. And we’re proud to help their transactions to flow smoothly.
Our clients have owned their company for years and years and years, and they want to sell it. They believe they have a good deal on the table and we want to do everything we can to make sure that goes smoothly. And our client gets all of their benefits of the bargain, everything they wanted. We want to do our best to make sure they get that. And if it happens and they’re happy, then we are proud. We’re very proud and we’re happy for them. So this combined knowing someone for 30+ years, their highs and lows, their difficult times, their good times, you can imagine, you really feel a bond for your clients.” – Dan Watkins, Founding Partner
Your Watkins Firm San Diego Business Attorney is a Valuable Partner
Your experienced San Diego business attorney at Watkins Firm is a valuable partner as you progress through the development of your business.
You will need a trusted business advisor you can count on. We invite you to review our podcast Episode 10 – The Importance of a Strong Corporate Attorney as well as the strong recommendations of our clients and contact the Watkins Firm or call 858-535-1511 for a complimentary consultation today.
Meet Daniel Watkins:
Daniel W. Watkins is a true people person who sincerely listens. He cares deeply about what others are going through. Dan enjoys digging into the facts and finding creative solutions to problems. He contributes his insights candidly and constructively.
Dan’s interest in people make him deeply invested in every relationship and his exuberant personality makes him a true litigator. Dan fights for his clients with a fierce and calculated commitment.
Dan has practiced in the areas of business, medical practices and healthcare business, high tech/science, real estate and employment defense law since 1987. He is a trusted litigation strategist and true trial attorney with over 50 jury and bench trials to his credit. Dan has successfully represented both large companies and individuals and achieved substantial victories in well-publicized trials throughout California and the U.S.
He is experienced in business and corporate formation and administration, as well as all forms of alternative dispute resolution, including binding arbitration and mediation.
THE ROAD TO BECOMING A BUSINESS LAWYER AND LITIGATOR
Dan has almost 40 years of experience working with, for and against some of the largest insurance companies in the country. He has successfully tried and litigated cases in the areas of Healthcare Compliance, Commercial Litigation, Unfair Business Practices, Fraud, Breach of Contract, Battery, Premises Liability, Product Defect, Medical Malpractice, Discrimination, Sexual Harassment, Construction Defect, as well as Unfair Competition, Defamation, and Trade Secrets.
In December 2003, Dan commenced litigation against Health South Surgery Centers-West, Inc and its’ subsidiaries, exposing the company’s extensive mismanagement and misconduct of its’ surgery centers. Dan has also been asked by some of California’s largest municipalities and corporations to conduct legally required investigations into matters involving alleged employment discrimination and harassment.
