Emerging companies typically need a combined legal and business advisor. Junior attorneys in emerging companies practice get access to clients early in their career and are often thrust into the critical advisor role.  What does a typical day look like, and how can you best prepare to support an emerging company?

 

More on Avi Emanuel and Lianna Whittleton.

 

SPEAKERS

Avi Emanuel, Wayne Stacy, Lianna Whittleton

 

Wayne Stacy  00:00

So welcome everyone to the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology's Careers in Technology podcasts. I'm Wayne Stacy, the Executive Director for BCLT. Today we are talking about how lawyers help with funding in managing early stage innovation companies. And I'm here with two attorneys from Wilson Sonsini, Wilson Sonsini handles a tremendous percentage of the emerging company work on the west coast, really among the great pioneers in this field. And we have two of the leading experts from Wilson. So this is a great podcast. We have Lianna Whittleton, she's the partner specializing in advising early stage companies, and in handling IPOs. And we have Avi Emanuel, a corporate attorney specializing in early and mid stage companies and equity financing. So before we talk about what the practice of law looks like, in the, in this emerging company space, tell us a little bit about what your practice looks like from day to day, week to week.

 

Lianna Whittleton  01:06

Sure, so I'll go ahead and take that first. As, as Wayne said, I have a bit of a broader practice, which has actually been very interesting to me. I think the core of what you think about when you are a corporate attorney is that you are a service provider to your clients. And your entire goal is to help these companies grow, build, develop and succeed. And so at Wilson, what that tends to mean is you get staff on a company, you develop a relationship, and then you support that company through their entire lifecycle. And what that often means is you are doing whatever it is your company needs you to do. And so depending on what clients are staffed on, when you start what's going on economically, that can actually change what your day to day client base looks like. In my case, I started over 10 years ago now. And I started working just with exclusively, early early stage companies two kids in a garage, right, your classic quintessential startup. And so what that meant is I was often doing board consents, right, a lot of the housekeeping in creating a corporate entity, and making sure that that functions from a legal perspective, forming the company. Doing the board and your stockholder approvals, granting equities, we did a fair amount of offer letters, because often new companies are hiring people as they get started and ramp up. And then over time, that starts to expand. Right. Um, one thing to understand as a student, that's always not clear is corporate attorneys tend to do the back office work. So what that means is we are more focused on the corporate structure and not the business itself. So we don't do licensing agreements, we don't do commercial arrangements, right, we do the fundraising, we do the the equity on the back side of how that company grows. And so I think it's contracts writ large, but often a very different type of contract. As your company grows, the types of things you're looking at on that back end, will start to change as well. And so you move from one on ones with your founders doing offer letters, doing board consents to more complicated transactions, that can mean your debt financing your bridge or your stakenotes, that it means seriously financing, it can mean the series A financing. And the longer