Harry Winograd Presents 5 STRONG IDEAS – The Business Law Institute
Here are five strong ideas I learned at the 2019 Business Law Institute.
The Business Law Section of the State Bar of Georgia invited me to present on one of my favorite topics – LLC and Partnership Disputes. While at the 38th Annual Business Law Institute, we had the opportunity to interact with and learn from top attorneys in the field. Preparing my presentation and attending the program, I picked up five strong ideas;
- For everyone – The red pie chart indicates that LLCs are where the action is in Georgia. The pie chart illustrates Georgia business entities formed in 2019. The red section are LLCs, the blue is for profit corporations, the green is non-profits, and grey is for other entities (banks, credit unions, etc.). Interesting to learn that 83.5% of Georgia entities formed this year are LLCs.
- For business owners – Owners, officers and directors participate in corporate governance and are subject to the Georgia Business Judgment Rule. This was discussed in my presentation from the LLC perspective, and was explored by Marbury Rainer, Partner at Parker, Hudson, Rainer & Dobbs, in which he discussed how a Board can evaluate executive compensation packages, in a typical setting where Board members often are chosen because they are close to the executive at issue. One strong takeaway is to encourage Boards to obtain independent advice and validation on compensation issues.
- For contract lawyers – There was a surprisingly interesting discussion of boilerplate contract terms by Jennifer Dempsey and William Custer from Bryan Cave which looked at those seemingly routine clauses, and then focused on how to beef up the boilerplate. One strong idea here was for contract drafting to customize boilerplate so that it explained how it should apply to your fact pattern or specific contract situation.
- For litigators – Big news at the courthouse will be the 2020 arrival of the new statewide Georgia business court. Walter Davis from Jones Day discussed his new role as Judge Davis with the Business Court, and he shared the plans to be open for new business litigation in August 2020.
- For me – This program was scheduled for the same week at the end of October that my work on the Georgia Business Litigation 2020 book arrived from the publisher The Chair of the Business Law Institute this year is Michael Carey from Bryan Cave. At the Institute, Michael introduced my presentation and he used this introduction to showcase the latest edition of our annual treatise. Michael is also a co-author of this excellent resource. More about that 2020 business litigation publication in a separate post soon.