Under A New Flag

* Last week I gave a national teleseminar for the National Business Institution "The Essentials of Asset Protection." You can buy copies for continuing education credits if you wish, I believe. I've lectured on the topic to lawyers for many years.

* Friday was the last day that the lawyers Anne McGihon, Andrea Montague and I, Andrew Oh-Willeke, did business as a branch office of the 500+ lawyer, Florida based law firm of Akerman Senterfitt LLP.

All of the lawyers of McGihon & Oh-Willeke, LLC joined Akerman on March 9, 2009. My practice remained commercial litigation, business transactions and estate planning. Anne McGihon's practice in Denver and Washington D.C. focused on public policy issues like representing clients in legislative and regulatory matters vis-a-vis the federal government. Andrea Montague worked with both of us.

As of this week, we are no longer affiliated with Akerman Senterfitt. Those of you who read websites like Above The Law, in the sidebar, know that this has been a very difficult time for big law firms. Most, including Akerman, have cut associate pay, reduced the number of lawyers and staff on their payrolls, reduced rent expenses, and focused on their long established core businesses. Akerman has followed suit determining that it was not ready at this time to take on expansion plans like the one our Denver South office involved. We have greatly enjoyed working with the lawyers at Akerman and continue to serve as local counsel for them in Colorado on select matters. For the vast majority of our clients, this simply means that they will start receiving e-mails from a new e-mail address and will see different stationary when they receive correspondence from us.

Big Law definitely has benefits, although there is always inconvenience adapting to the peculiarities of life in a big organization. But, small is beautiful too. Our telephone numbers and address are the same for now, and e-mail to our old e-mail address will be automatically forwarded in this interim period.

* For readers of this blog, this means that I am no longer professionally limited from discussing the affairs of past clients of the firm, many of whom are in the health care, banking, real estate development and financial sectors. My duties to this firm clients and the risk that I would share insider information (or be perceived as having it, I rarely actually did have insider information that was blogworthy, and most of that was information that was on the verge of public announcement anyway) has limited my ability to blog in this area over the last nine months. Obviously, I still have clients whose privacy and interests must be respected, but I don't have to continue considering the interests of the clients to whom I had only a vicarious connection through my attorney colleagues in the large firm.