The Business Transitions Group at Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt is 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. We do so by delivering a full range of strategic business succession and transition planning counsel. Our group includes highly trained professionals with extensive experience in all aspects of business exit planning.

We work in conjunction with other succession and exit-planning professionals and serve as trusted advisors to our clients, guiding them through the sometimes bewildering business transition process. We also help our clients make the most and best use of their valuable assets: for themselves, their families and the beneficiaries of their philanthropic interest, or in pursuit of their next entrepreneurial venture.

Schwabe’s Business Transitions Group helps businesses and their owners:

• Evaluate the current personnel, business and market landscape
• Assess transition readiness
• Identify important issues well in advance of a transition
• Review and evaluate available transition alternatives
• Develop custom-tailored exit strategies or plans that align personal goals with business life cycles and opportunities
• Design and implement strategies to reduce legal and business risks and improve business value and transferability
• Implement transitions and manage the transition process
• Develop and implement tax-minimization strategies
• Capture, retain and make effective use of value resulting from business transitions to achieve personal goals and objectives

Our interdisciplinary group is dedicated to providing outstanding client service and drawing on innovative practices to help privately held businesses and their 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
• Family or management succession, including family and board governance and family offices
• Sale to a third party
• Sale or transition to management or employees
• Transactions with co-owners or partners, including buy-sell or shareholders’ agreements
• Refinancings, recapitalizations and liquidity transactions
• Employee incentives and retention, and other alignment alternatives
• Value maximization of a business, including corporate, financial, intellectual property and risk-management planning
• Maintaining asset value through estate, real estate, intellectual property, employee and tax planning
• Assisting in the design, establishment and operation of family offices
• Legacy planning

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