Pablo S. Quesada focuses his practice in the areas of corporate, real estate and international law, including mergers and acquisitions, private equity transactions, stock and debt issuances and offerings, financing and lending transactions, domestic and international commercial transactions, and other general transactional matters. Mr. Quesada has extensive experience in matters affecting corporations, limited liability companies and partnerships, and in manufacturing, distribution, licensing and technology-related transactions. In addition, given the litigation and trial experience gained by Mr. Quesada early in his career, he provides his expertise in the corporate arena to assist in the handling of complex commercial litigation matters involving corporate, stockholder and/or board governance issues. Mr. Quesada also serves as General Counsel and is a director for one of the largest U.S. military apparel manufacturers.

Episode transcription:

[00:00:00] Pablo Quesada: The trouble that use that you saw and you continue to see, and the big item you need to be careful with when you're dealing with contingent workers is, you know, when you're hiring somebody as independent contractor, it becomes the issue of misclassification. And you know, we've seen that now for many years, for over a decade. Misclassification issues, which means somebody who is effectively an employee of your company, but you're treating them as an independent contractor.

[00:00:40] I'm Pablo Quesada. I'm a partner at SMGQ mall in Miami, Florida.

[00:00:46] Jahn Karsybaev: [00:00:46] I will thank you so much for finding time to join us on the podcast today. A great way to start off the 2021 and just real quick, before we get a lot into the conversation that I wanted to have with you, share with us a little bit more about yourself, your backgrounds, where you come from and kind of career-wise, just share a kind of high-level timeline.

[00:01:10] Pablo Quesada: Absolutely. Well, I'm a local Miami person. I was raised in Miami. I went to the University of Miami for undergrad. Then I went to Florida state for law school. Soon after law school, I came back to Miami. I worked at one of the larger Miami firms or with some of the most probably locally prominent attorneys.

[00:01:28] And then I had an opportunity to go to a national firm and work out of their Miami office. And I've been practicing now for over 25 years, but that's where I got my start at the big national law firms and had opportunities to work on very interesting clients matters. And after I worked in the corporate securities department, so I did mostly corporate transactional with about 30% of my practice being public company work.

[00:01:54] So actual public filings, quarterly reports, annual reports. Interestingly I was able to work for about four years when I was at the firm. It was Kirkpatrick and Lockhart at the time KNL Gates, which is Bill Gates, his father, actually, he was a well of the Gates law firm. They merged at some point, but back then I had the opportunity to work with a Miami company called Brightstar, which was a telecommunication logistics company, basically cell phone distribution, and the CEO of that company was much of a settler cloud who is now with SoftBank and starting division funds. And he's been very active in the Miami community to fund startups and technology companies. I had an opportunity to work with him for about four years. That was a great opportunity because that was really his first company that he took it. I think when we were working together, he took that from like 300 million in sales to 5 billion in sales, over a span of like four years.

[00:02:49] So it was pretty incredible. It was a great experience. I did that. And then I always had the bug to go in-house to go on the corporate side. And I had an opportunity, a very good friend of mine who's still at Visa, the credit card company. He gave me a ring one day and he said, listen, they're looking fo