Privately Held Businesses & Enterprises
- Business and Corporate
- Privately Held Businesses & Enterprises
- Financial Institutions
- Mergers and Acquisitions
- Securities and Finance
- International Business
- Immigration
- Corporate Formation and Governance
Overview
We are a multi-disciplinary team of attorneys focused on helping our clients capture, maximize, protect, and transfer the wealth that they have built in their businesses and preserve their business and community legacy. We do so by delivering a full range of strategic and coordinated business succession, transition planning, and estate planning legal advice. Our group intimately knows our clients’ industry and includes highly trained professionals with extensive experience in all aspects of business exit and legacy planning. We help our clients seek the highest and best use of their valuable assets—for themselves, their employees, future generations of their families, the beneficiaries of their philanthropic interest, or in pursuit of their next entrepreneurial venture.
“It’s not personal; it’s business” doesn’t apply.
We understand that it is personal. Our attorneys help our clients navigate and avoid risks that might threaten a privately held or family-owned business or enterprise, assess transition or change readiness, review and evaluate alternatives, and develop custom-tailored exit or legacy planning strategies or plans that align personal goals with business life cycles and opportunities. We work in conjunction with other succession, family, and exit-planning professionals to serve as trusted legal advisors to our clients, guiding them through the sometimes bewildering business transformation process. We focus on the needs of our clients, including their long-term goals.
Our interdisciplinary group is dedicated to providing outstanding client service and drawing on innovative practices to help privately held businesses and their current or future owners. We guide clients at every step of the way to navigate the spectrum of business transition alternatives and issues, including:
- Business contingency or continuity planning, and designing and implementing strategies to reduce legal and business risks, preserve generational wealth, and improve business value and transferability
- Family or management succession issues, including family and board governance, family offices, integrating non-family members into the company structure, intra- and intergenerational rivalries among family members, breaches of fiduciary duties, determining lines of authority, and evaluating the current personnel, business, and market landscape
- Sale to a third party
- Sale or transition to management or employees, including strategies to develop and retain the next generation of leadership
- Transactions with co-owners, partners, or family members, including buy-sell or shareholders’ agreements, and if need be, reducing friction, conflict resolution, or litigation
- Refinancings, recapitalizations, and liquidity transactions
- Executive compensation, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), employee incentives and retention, and other alignment alternatives
- Value maximization of a business, including legal advice on corporate, financial, intellectual property, and risk-management planning and troubleshooting
- Maintaining asset value through estate, real estate, intellectual property, employee, and tax planning
- Assisting in the design, establishment, and operation of family offices
- Retirement, legacy planning, estate planning, and developing and implementing tax-minimization strategies
Client Results
When Henningsen Cold Storage, a fifth-generation family-owned business, was ready to sell, they turned to Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt
June 15, 2021
Related Services
Related Industries
Resources & Ideas
Events
- Ties, Taxes, and the Future of Estate Planning
- Ethics in Farm Succession
- Estate Planning Workshop
- Will Planning Seminar
- Farm Succession and Tax Issues
- How to Close a Trust
- Farm & Ranch Succession Planning (Burns on July 18 and City of Vale on July 19)
- Farm and Ranch Succession Planning (Burns on September 7 and Ontario on September 8)
Legal Articles
- Daily Journal of Commerce Oregon
- DJC Oregon
- Daily Journal of Commerce
- Vancouver Business Journal
- Daily Journal of Commerce
- Daily Journal of Commerce
- Daily Journal of Commerce
- Daily Journal of Commerce
- Daily Journal of Commerce
- Idaho Business Review
- Daily Journal of Commerce
- Daily Journal of Commerce
- Puget Sound Business Journal
Attorneys
- Seonaíd BarngroverAssociate
- Jessie MingerShareholder
- Jennifer WoodhouseShareholder
- Shareholder
- Shareholder