Commercial Transactions & Business Counseling
Foley’s Commercial Transactions & Business Counseling Practice comprises attorneys who are both generalists and authorities to serve you in the most effective manner.
Our Commercial Transactions & Business Counseling attorneys often serve as “general counsel” dealing with entity organization and governance, legal compliance, and risk management in connection with day-to-day business operations and dispute resolution. Frequently, our threshold responsibility is to identify legal issues, after which we coordinate the assistance of authorities, within and outside of the firm, as necessary to reach appropriate resolution.
As an adjunct to their more generalized functions, our Commercial Transactions & Business Counseling attorneys are frequently responsible for the numerous large and small commercial transactions that are the lifeblood of Foley’s business clients like you. In connection with that role, the attorneys in this practice maintain full knowledge in the many legal disciplines that affect such transactions.
The key areas of the practice’s competence are the following:
Our attorneys are experienced in all aspects of state and federal regulation of commerce, as well as the analogous laws of major U.S. trading partners. We prepare and monitor antitrust compliance programs and policies, counsel on horizontal and vertical arrangements and monopolization issues, and are knowledgeable concerning the Sherman, Clayton, and Robinson-Patman Acts, state antitrust statutes, and the Treaty of Rome. We also can counsel you regarding the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act and the FTC’s various regulations and enforcement policies.
If your business involves the manufacture, sale, and/or the purchase of tangible and intangible products, our Commercial Transactions & Business Counseling attorneys can assist you in negotiating, drafting, and enforcing:
- Equipment sales and purchase agreements, as well as equipment leasing
- Requirements and supply contracts
- Manufacturing, sourcing, and turnkey agreements
- Intellectual property licenses
- Field service agreements and extended warranty programs
- Terms of purchase and sale, whether effected electronically or in paper-based transactions
- Aviation and aircraft transaction services
Product distribution systems are a species of commercial transactions that are subject to a significant degree of regulation, both at the state and federal levels in the United States and in foreign countries. Further, the relationships among the various components of such systems are not always amicable — a fact of business life that frequently gives rise to litigation. In addition to drafting or reviewing and negotiating distributorship, sales representation, and franchise agreements and programs, attorneys in the group can counsel you with regard to all aspects of your domestic and international distribution, franchise, and commissioned agency arrangements.
We enjoy a long history of assisting in establishing, administering, and terminating distribution relationships efficiently and effectively. Among Foley’s products distribution clients are manufacturers, distributors, and franchisees of products in virtually all markets, including automobiles, major consumer appliances, farm and construction equipment, computer hardware and software, food, clothing, medical supplies and equipment, and alcoholic beverages.
Our Commercial Transactions & Business Counseling Practice provides practical and efficient credit law advice to the full spectrum of non-financial-institution businesses involved in finance transactions, whether as borrowers or as lenders. The group represents clients in traditional lending relationships, as well as in connection with extensions of credit incidental to commercial transactions. Our attorneys are responsible for successful collection and restructuring of many clients’ troubled credits, in and outside of bankruptcy.
We counsel business clients like you on the factors to be considered in choosing the form for their businesses, and assist in implementing those choices. We have organized corporations, partnerships, limited liability companies, and other legal entities throughout the United States and in several foreign countries, and assist in the negotiation and preparation of joint venture agreements, buy/sell agreements, and voting trusts.