WHEN IT COMES TO BUSINESS, WE’VE GOT YOUR BACK.
No one knows the pieces to your business better than you. Yet, The Law Offices of Michael E. Zapin can help you to put those pieces together and keep them from falling apart, when your business needs to meet its ordinary and extraordinary challenges.
Your business’s best defense starts in the boardroom – not the courtroom.
At the risk of painfully stating the obvious: the best defense to litigation is to avoid it in the first place. Of course that’s not always possible. If your business finds itself in a situation where it is being pulled into a litigation, or if your business needs to prosecute its own claims against a third party, The Law Offices of Michael E. Zapin brings a combined total of over 31 years of practical litigation experience in both New York and Florida, ranging from garden variety collection matters through complex real estate and fraud matters, at both trial and appellate levels.
What’s interesting is that many of the cases that come through our doors are cases that may have been prevented, if there were effective written agreements or communications governing the relationship between the disputing parties.
Agreements are only as good as the words written into them. Commercial claims often succeed or fail based on the soundness and completeness of those written provisions. Written agreements can also provide for certain remedies that might not otherwise be available to an aggrieved party under the law, absent an appropriate written provision.
Why wait for the storm? Even if you haven’t run into a commercial dispute in your business, the odds are overwhelming that at some point you will. Now is the best time for you to review or prepare operative written agreements that will govern your business to insure that your interests are adequately protected and remedies readily available to you in case something does go wrong.
Good Lawyering Means Getting In and Then Out of the Way of a Good Deal
We’ve all heard it before. Effective negotiation is an art not a science. Our job as your general counsel is to help you meet your business goals by securing terms most favorable for your business. Sometimes that involves putting up roadblocks; slowing the deal down just enough to be sure that you understand what exactly you are getting yourself into, the risks involved if you go forward with the transaction, and what you can expect, if, for some reason, either you or the other party are unable or unwilling to perform the transaction at the required time.
That’s the “getting in the way” part of this discussion. Now for the “getting out of the way” part of the discussion….
One of the things The Law Offices of Michael E. Zapin prides itself on, is its ability to think critically “outside-the-box” – to make your desired transaction a reality. We do this by not merely identifying problems, but by offering up real solutions that create win-win situations for both parties involved. What’s an example?
Consider the following real-life success story for one of our clients:
Client and partner desired to dissolve their closely-held corporation. It was a holding company, who’s only asset was a commercial building. As a result of a personal dispute, the partners wanted to dissolve the company but could not agree on terms. They were 50-50% partners in the company and they were legally deadlocked.
Rather than file a costly dissolution proceeding for the corporation, or a protracted partition action for the property (company and partners were severally on the deed), we proposed a private auction to be held exclusively between the two disputing partners, with an agreed-upon disinterested referee. It was an absolute auction where the property would go to the highest bidder of the two partners.
The partner of our client offered our client a price he could not refuse. Given the state of the real estate market at the time, the price secured was well above present fair market value and offered our client a very generous return. Our client was able to use that immediate capital to make an alternative desired investment. Our client felt he received the better of the bargain.
In a candid conversation with both the partner and his own lawyer after the deal was consummated, we learned that the partner also felt that he received the better of the bargain, because his vision was more long- term. He believed that the value on the property was going to rise over time, and that it was going to be well worth the amount of money it cost him to buy out our client.
In short, it was a win-win scenario for both parties.