Category: Book Review

The Healthcare Executive’s Simple Guide to FMV For Attorneys, C-Suite, Compliance, and Physicians

Health ABA adsThe ABA has developed a guide for healthcare executives: The Healthcare Executive’s Simple Guide to FMV For Attorneys, C-Suite, Compliance, and Physicians.  This guide has been developed to provide basic information on nearly every type of transaction or compensation arrangement that must adhere to the FMV standard.

Click here to order.

This guide will help healthcare executives navigate nearly every type of FMV opinion for transactions and compensation agreements. Readers will be able to quickly access pertinent material to help better understand and ensure a sound FMV analysis.

The Guide covers:
• Current regulatory environment and guidance behind FMV
• What to ask when engaging an appraiser to help ensure you will get a defensible opinion
• Value drivers behind over 20 of the most common facility transactions and agreement types
• Checklist when reviewing a FMV opinion and the Commercially Reasonable standard

 

Continuing the Conversation Around Working Women

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Anne-Marie Slaughter’s July 2012 Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Cant Have it All” stirred up the coals in the ever-simmering firestorm regarding working women. Further fueled by the March 2013 publication of Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, it seemed everyone had a word of criticism to offer.

The abundant criticism often missed the larger point – the conversation is important, and these two women should be applauded for spurring it.

Lean In contains illustrative stories about what holds women back in career and life, and offers encouragement for overcoming them. Sandberg, a Harvard graduate, mom of two, and wife to David Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey, has had a storied career. The current COO of Facebook, she began her career as a research assistant to Lawrence Summers at the World Bank and later she served as a management consultant at McKinsey. She then became the chief of staff to Summers at the Treasury Department and spent six and a half years at Google, where she rose to the post of vice president of global online sales and operations. She also made it to the top of the notoriously male-dominated world of Silicon Valley, where the paucity of women among engineers, inventors andcomputer scientists is still clearly visible.

There is no doubt that Lean In offers a glimpse into the lives of the rich and famous that Sandberg affords (after all, Forbes lists her as the sixth most powerful woman). But, net worth and fame notwithstanding, there is valuable insight for women in the legal industry, where men still dominate at management and executive levels.

Take a chance

When Sandberg first received a job offer at Google in 2001, she questioned the title: Business Unit General Manager. There were no business units to manage and the company had less than 1000 employees at the time. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.” Sandberg went on to become Google’s vice president of Global Online Sales and Operations. Today, Google has over 30,000 employees.

Similarly, lawyers, and non-lawyer professionals in the industry, are often advised to decline a job opportunity if it means a step-down in title. These people may miss an opportunity to catapult their career by joining a growth organization simply because of a few words on a business card.

Don’t be afraid to negotiate

In 1970, American women made 59 cents for every dollar men earned. In 2010, women earned just 77 cents for every dollar men made. Sandberg’s solution: negotiate like a man. When she was talking to Mark Zuckerberg about joining Facebook, Sandberg says she was inclined to accept the first offer he made because she really wanted to work for Facebook. Both her husband and brother-in-law encouraged her to make a counter-offer, saying, “Damn it, Sheryl! Why are you going to make less than any man would make to do the same job?” Sandberg counter-offered.

She told Zuckerberg that he was hiring her to run his deal teams and this would be the only time they would ever be on opposite sides of the table. She laid out what she wanted, and got a more lucrative offer the next day.

Stop trying to please everyone

Herein lies an important female personality issue in the workplace. Most of us place significant value on being liked. During her first performance review, Sandberg notes Zuckerberg told her, “Your biggest problem is you worry way too much about everyone liking you all the time.” He said she would never make an impact unless she said something that at least one person disagreed with. “It’s going to hold you back,” he warned her.

Employees who concentrate on results and impact are more valuable than those who focus on fitting in and pleasing everyone.

View child care costs as an investment

Sandberg notes that over the past decade, child care costs have risen twice as fast as the median income of families with children. The cost for two children (an infant and a four-year-old) to go to a day care center is greater than the annual median rent payment in every state in the country. Rigid work schedules, lack of paid family leave, and expensive or undependable child care derail women’s best work efforts. Sandberg encourages women to compare child care costs to their future salary instead of their current one. Initial child care costs are an investment in a working mother’s career.

Include men in the conversation

Sandberg believes that the single most important career decision a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner will be. A partner’s lack of participation in child care and domestic tasks are significant factors in some women’s decisions to leave the workforce or reduce their hours.

Because there are still significantly more men at the top of every industry, the proverbial good-old-boy network continues to flourish. And because there are already a reduced number of women in leadership roles, it is not possible for junior women to get enough support unless senior men mentor them.

The simple conclusion Sandberg strove for, clearly communicated and ultimately obtained, is that by turning the focus of the feminist movement toward personal choices, society has failed to encourage women to aspire to leadership. Thus the conversation needs to continue.

 

Kathryn Whitaker is Business Development Specialist at K&L Gates in Charleston, SC.

 

Ioana Good manages communications at Lowndes, Drosdick, Doster, Kantor & Reed, P.A. in Orlando, FL.

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Women Really CAN Have it All – Ridding the Legal Field of “The Mommy” / “Tiger Lady” Oxymoron

The National Law Review recently published a book review of, Women Really CAN Have it All – Ridding the Legal Field of “The Mommy” / “Tiger Lady” Oxymoron, by Heidi R. Wendland of The National Law Review / The National Law Forum LLC:

The National Law Review a top volume legal news website

Long gone is the notion that a woman’s place is at home. Anne Murphy Brown has had her own success in balancing motherhood with a legal career as a litigator, corporate attorney and currently as an Assistant Professor and Director of Legal Studies at Ursuline College. Anne Murphy Brown finds more than 20 other women who have enjoyed the same successes and profiles them in Legally Mom: Real Women’s Stories of Balancing Motherhood and Law Practice. She does an excellent job in making this book relevant to every woman by carefully selecting a diverse array of women to profile. She finds women practicing at law firms and at governmental agencies. She also profiles women who have started their own law firms, who pursue a legal career from home, and who work as in house counsel at corporations. Each chapter contains a different woman’s personal experience and perspectives in balancing motherhood and her legal career. While all of these women face unique challenges depending on which course of work they pursue in the legal field, a common theme prevails throughout the entire book. The recipe for success of “having it all” is the same: these women have been successful because they have had support, drive, and a realistic grasp on their own personal limitations.

Many of the women within Legally Mom are able to pursue a career and be a mother because they have strong support from their husbands. Their husbands help split the parenting duties allowing the mother to keep up with the demands of her career. Other women profiled are not as lucky, and have to find support outside of the home. Some find support from family members in the form of child care. Others find support from within their workplace through understanding bosses, flexible hours, and policies enacted for mothers within the firm such as paid time off, nursing rooms, and child care offered on the premises. Anne Murphy Brown also provides the reader with a great resource: www.mamalaw.com . This website was created by a group of career moms to serve as a forum for other career moms to lend support to each other.

All the women profiled share a desire to succeed as both a mother and a lawyer. The book demonstrates how women have to fight for their right to pursue a career while being a mother and every woman profiled gives excellent advice as to how to do so. They have to be comfortable in confronting their bosses in order to achieve what they want. In fact, one woman profiled mentions an excellent point that it is to a firm’s detriment to not be flexible for women attorneys. Law firms and companies lose many educated women to motherhood because they do not enact policies that provide for flexibility to pursue both. This interesting perspective gives the reader a great negotiating tool when confronting her employer.

Women who want both a career and to be a mother must still acknowledge that there are limits since there are only 24 hours in a day. The women in the book all prioritize their lives in different ways and give advice as to how to live with the choices they make. In the end, the women do what works best for their own unique situation.

For some women profiled, being a mother and pursuing a legal career was something they always knew they wanted to balance. For other women profiled, being a mother was an afterthought and it was not until they had established themselves within their career did they consider starting their families. Every woman who is considering whether it is possible to be a mother and pursue a legal career should read this book. Every woman who thinks it is impossible to have both should certainly read this book. While woman have a huge task in front of them when deciding to be a mother and a career lady, this book proves it is not impossible. With effective time management, a woman can pursue a successful career and be a good mother. Legally Mom serves to enhance the feeling of female camaraderie in a traditionally male dominated career of law, and will no doubt inspire every reader and continue the movement for change and women empowerment.

Copyright ©2012 National Law Forum, LLC

Protecting Trade Secrets Before, During and After Litigation: A Book Review

A book review of Protecting Trade Secrets Before, During and After Litigation authored by Chris Scott Graham, by S. Merchant of The National Law Review / The National Law Forum LLC was recently published in The National Law Review:

The National Law Review

Protecting Trade Secrets Before, During and After Litigation is attorney Chris Scott Graham’s insider’s guide on the inner workings of trade secrets cases stemming from his twenty-five years of practicing law and serving as chair of Dechert law firm’s trade secrets practice. With its meticulousness and straightforwardness, the book reads like a bisection between an exposé on the professional life of a litigation attorney and Trade Secrets for Dummies.  Mr. Graham takes the perspective of legal counsel when handling such a case and explores the impediments they will face, the circumstances they must take into consideration and the particularities of common trade secrets issues.

Trade secrets misappropriation, most commonly relevant in cases involving technology in a business setting, is a specialized area falling within the umbrella of intellectual property law. Yet Mr. Graham refrains from waxing technical and instead presents a narrative, starting with the initial meeting with a prospective client, the trade secret owner, to the measured steps required in litigation, to seeking post-judgment equitable relief. The guide penultimately concludes with a how-to on crafting contractual provisions advantageous to the trade secret owner and developing an auditing process to determine whether businesses are adequately protecting their trade secrets.  As a bonus, the guide culminates with an appendix containing a sample stipulated protective order for litigation involving trade secrets with helpful footnotes providing further pointers— the cherry on top indeed, particularly for new attorneys branching into this area of the law.

Most significant is how the guide blends the theory of intellectual property law with a healthy dosage of pragmatism, as Mr. Graham takes on the challenge of getting into the nitty-gritty minutia of being an attorney in this field. For instance, in the context of identifying factors that render a case unfavorable for trade secrets litigation purposes,  the guide delves into the art of composing pre-suit demand letters, including the level of detail needed, specific language to use when listing the demands and the proper tone to use so as to not risk appearing “cavalier.” Later, in an analysis about selecting a venue for litigation, the guide launches into an exhaustive list detailing over twenty determinants to take into account.

A point of emphasis in the guide is how to effectively counsel clients throughout the litigation process, and the practical aspects of the guide extend to this discussion as well. Mr. Graham remains precise in his directions of how to navigate clients, from tactfully extracting the confidential nature of their trade secret to calculating their return on investment in relation to their litigation budget.  It appears that the trade secrets practitioner must morph into educator, risk analyst, business owner, appraiser and confidant—we may have missed that course in law school on how to accomplish all this but Mr. Graham succeeds in filling in the gaps.

At thirteen chapters and a total of 310 pages, including citations and an index, the guide manages to succinctly delineate the entire litigation process in trade secrets misappropriation cases. Along with intellectual property law, the guide incorporates contract, civil procedure and tort principles in its chronicle of the litigation process. A notable and perhaps unorthodox facet of the guide is how it portrays the dynamics of being an attorney in this field with utmost realism. As Mr. Graham himself states, his work is analogous to a law firm “whiteboard session…with everyone brainstorming to identify potential pivotal points on the issues at hand.” After examining the guide, one can see that when it comes to trade secrets litigation, it’s all in the detail.

Copyright ©2012 National Law Forum, LLC