BALA CYNWYD, Pennsylvania – Company Counsel LLC, a small business general counsel law firm, launches today in Philadelphia and seeks to provide subscription-based legal services and business consulting for Pennsylvania small business owners and entrepreneurs.
“For years, the family businesses, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs in Greater Philadelphia were drastically underserved and often at legal risk,” says founder Bernard A. Williams. “While the mid-sized businesses and up can afford in-house counsel, small businesses often found it cost-prohibitive to bring on a full-time attorney, and the costs of outside counsel can be astronomical and difficult to predict.”
Williams has developed a legal services model that ensures that clients have continuous, all-encompassing legal counsel without jeopardizing their cash flow and profitability. Representative subject areas of coverage include business law, employment law, intellectual property, and tax law.
“I want to see a world where anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit can live out their dreams without any fear of failure,” says Williams. “I’ve found that by helping small business owners to be proactive, they become better prepared to handle adversity and better positioned to thrive.”
When clients first begin one of Company Counsel’s monthly service plans, they are taken through a risk assessment as the foundation to develop a game plan for the year. There is a fixed monthly fee that covers all of the defined legal services that the company needs or anticipates, allowing the company to set its legal budget in advance. The basic protection package starts at only $300 per month, and as the client’s needs grow and change, Company Counsel’s service plans can scale to support them.
Mr. Williams says this about working with small business owners. “I’ve represented Fortune 100 companies, and I’ve represented ‘mom-and-pops’, and it turns out that most of their legal challenges are not as different as you might think. The biggest difference is that the bigger companies have traditionally had more resources to address those challenges, whereas small business owners were on their own.”
In addition to its subscription model, another attribute that makes Company Counsel different from most other business law firms is that its attorneys actually litigate cases. Small firms that offer business law usually do transactional services only, and not litigation. To find legal counsel who are experts in business law transactions who also litigate, companies have, by and large, needed to go to big and expensive law firms. It is an advantage to small companies that Company Counsel can handle transactions and litigation because it saves the client money, and helps them to anticipate and avoid problems.
Company Counsel is located at 2 Bala Plaza Suite 300, Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004.
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About Bernard A. Williams, Esq
Bernard A. Williams, Esq., is the founder and managing partner of the Philadelphia law firm Company Counsel LLC, where he focuses his practice on business law, employment law, commercial litigation, and management consulting. Before forming Company Counsel, Mr. Williams was a partner of Legis Group LLC, located in Philadelphia. Before joining the Legis Group, Mr. Williams was the owner and general counsel of More Likely To Succeed, Inc., an educational services company in the greater Philadelphia area. Before that, Mr. Williams was a senior associate in the Commercial Litigation Practice Group at Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP, located in Philadelphia. Mr. Williams entered private practice as an associate in the Litigation Department at Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP, located in New York. Before that, Mr. Williams served as a law clerk to the Honorable Theodore McMillian of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Mr. Williams received his bachelor’s degree from American University and his J.D. from New York University School of Law, where he served as a staff editor and associate editor of the NYU Law Review. Mr. Williams is a published author, and a frequent speaker on topics relating to business planning, operations, and legal strategy for small businesses. Learn more about Mr. Williams and Company Counsel at www.CompanyCounsel.law.
