As the economy continues to improve, more and more companies will be looking for opportunities, and oftentimes, they will come in the form of acquisitions, mergers, spin-offs, dissolutions and more. It’s good news for business lawyers, but potentially bad news if you represent one of the companies being dissolved or merged into another.
In the last two years, many of my law firm clients have faced this predicament, seeing their long-standing, loyal clients eaten up by other companies. In many cases, the clients were purchased by companies that already had their own law firms in place and were happy with them — thus negating the need for my clients’ services in the future. To make matters worse, often the executive or in-house lawyer who “fed” my clients’ work lost his or her job (sometimes suddenly) and thus was not in a position to tout the law firm to the acquiring company.
