Joint Ventures and Strategic Alliances

Our lawyers provide legal advice at every stage of the joint venture and strategic alliance life cycle, from formation, to navigating issues that arise as the business grows, to exit. Our broad interdisciplinary capabilities help clients establish and grow successful joint ventures and strategic alliances. We understand that any joint venture or strategic alliance requires a sound legal and regulatory framework that accommodates long-term goals and allows the parties to adapt to the unexpected. To that end, our practice group lawyers collaborate on a fully integrated basis with professionals from across all other practice areas to provide comprehensive advice, strategies and solutions.

Our joint venture and strategic alliance work spans many different industries including financial services, government contracting and services, energy, real estate and construction, and technology. Within government contracting, our lawyers have extensive experience in teaming and working with SBA’s All Small Mentor/Protégé Program joint venture agreements. We have helped our clients create a wide variety of durable and effective joint venture and alliance structures both within a jurisdiction and across borders.

In contributing to our clients’ success, our support includes:

Defining parties’ roles and contributions

• Developing and negotiating term sheets to meet the parties’ operational, tax, accounting, and exit goals
• Defining capital requirements and obligations, addressing allocation of profits and losses, cash distribution, and related tax matters
• Addressing management responsibilities, including designing deadlock resolution mechanisms
• Navigating potential impacts on the members of a joint venture with respect to new or existing debt and credit facilities
• Conducting regulatory reviews
• IP assessment and planning
• Entity formation

Operations

• Renegotiating partner terms as roles and interests change
• Documenting, negotiating and closing commercial lending arrangements on behalf of joint ventures and/or its members
• Establishing employee benefits and agreements
• Helping to protect, license and exploit developed intellectual property
• Negotiating customer, supplier, and other commercial contracts
• Advising on cybersecurity and data privacy issues

Governance and Disputes

• Advice on ongoing governance issues
• Helping to define and resolve disputes informally
• Advising and assisting in mediating disputes
• Resolving all types of disputes through litigation

Exit and Monetization

• Adding new partners
• Buying out a partner’s interest
• Selling all or part of a joint venture or its assets to new investors
• Winding down and distribution of assets