Practice Areas
Strategic Thinking | Intelligent Planning | Legal, Regulatory and Business Risk Management
Prudent risk-taking is not just the engine of business success, it is the indispensable driver of all human progress. Thus, risk management is not the foil of business or an impediment to profit, but their propellant.
Morian Law PLLC’s objective is to empower clients to take bold but prudent risk by helping them distinguish between necessary and unnecessary risks, and devising and implementing strategies to mitigate the latter in a manner and at a cost that makes business sense. The Firm helps clients think strategically and plan intelligently and integrate legal and risk management thinking into their business processes and management decision-making.
Morian Law PLLC takes a prosecutorial approach to risk management born of years of experience in government enforcement investigating matters with highly complex and esoteric fact patterns. The Firm knows where to look and what questions to ask to identify the hidden risks clients face in both regulated and unregulated industries, many of which hide in plain sight.
Morian Law PLLC’s strategic counseling services are focused on:
- Legal, regulatory, and business risk audits and legal stress testing of business lines, product and service offerings, and business processes and systems
- Development of internal controls and compliance programs and improved corporate governance and management decision-making
- Protection of critical business assets (intellectual property, integrity of information technology systems)
- Contingency and crisis management planning
- Regulatory filings and public disclosures
Outside General Counsel Services
Morian Law PLLC’s outside general counsel services are intended for companies that do not have an in-house legal department but would like to enjoy the advantages of those that do in a flexible way and at a fraction of the cost of traditional, full-time, executive-level general counsel. Firms without such first call capability often wait to consult with a lawyer until a problem arises that could have been avoided at lower cost had they done so.
The Firm provides sophisticated counsel on an array of routine legal matters that may arise in the day-to-day management of a client’s business, engaging specialized counsel in instances that require such specialization.
The objective to is empower companies and organizations to better achieve their goals by helping them proactively manage legal risks in a manner that reduces business, accounting, transactional, and opportunity costs, and saves worry, so that clients can focus on their results while avoiding the fixed costs of maintaining a legal department of their own.
Outside Special Counsel Services
Morian Law PLLC also serves as outside special counsel for companies that already have in house legal counsel but who could benefit from an outside perspective or do not wish to add more full-time staff. The objectivity of legal counsel is paramount. Advice from an outside lawyer with an outside perspective can be a critical advantage by helping companies systematically avoid problems that may arise when the lines between legal and business advice from inside counsel become blurred, as they sometimes do.
Litigation and Dispute Resolution
The best kind of conflict is the one avoided. But if confrontation becomes inevitable, whether the need is to play defense or go on the offense, Morian Law PLLC’s goal is to get clients out of the quagmire as quickly as their adversary or the circumstances got them into it, with as little disruption to business, reputation, and life as possible and with as little cost as possible in opportunity, distraction, and above all, resources.
The key is to know when to litigate and when not to; which issues to challenge and which to let go; where the ultimate strengths and weaknesses lie in the law, the facts, the claims and the defenses; how to maximize bargaining power and create the conditions conducive to resolution on terms that make sense; how to pressure the adversary to find the common ground; and failing all that, how to find a way to win.
Government Investigations and Special Matters
Government investigations, corporate scandals, high profile, or business-threatening lawsuits, cybersecurity breaches, or cancel culture incidents can be calamitous or even fatal to a small or medium sized business by squelching goodwill, curtailing access to credit, interrupting business continuity, or causing the suspension or loss of a critical license to operate. Equally so with non-profits, who can see their ability to raise funds, access their assets, and achieve their raison d’aitre evaporate overnight because of a state regulatory action.
Morian Law PLLC has the knowledge and skill to help clients deal with such sensitive regulatory, enforcement and litigation challenges.
Long experience on the government side of the subpoena has given Morian Law PLLC an instinctual understanding of the mentality of regulators, the differing approaches they take, and the factors that influence their priorities and exercise of discretion. It has also given the Firm an insider’s perspective about how investigations can be effectively contained and resolved to limit client exposure through carefully chosen proactive disclosures or other remedial actions that may be acceptable to regulators while also making business sense. These are important skills in an age of prosecutorial overreach and “three felonies a day.”
Strategic and Crisis Communications
Organizations often need strategic communications that fall at the intersection of law, business and persuasion, which can be necessitated by the ordinary imperatives of business or by a crisis. And legal responses can create as many disclosure and communications challenges as the events that gave rise to them.
Whether the circumstances are routine or involve a crisis, communication with key constituencies is critical. The Firm helps clients address this need by developing and drafting white papers and other strategic communications directed toward regulators, trade publications, and general audiences alike, to inform, shape opinion and prepare the ground for success, whatever the season.
Morian Law PLLC’s experience with sensitive, high-profile matters carrying significant reputational consequences has given the Firm a sensibility for the public relations and disclosure dimensions of legal matters and how they may be effectively managed. This is especially critical in age in which even a discrete controversy can become a franchise-threatening international scandal in a matter of hours.