Hubbard Business Counsel

The mission of Hubbard Business Counsel is to help businesses both to survive and to thrive in today’s—and tomorrow’s—business, legal, and financial environment. These roles are crucial to that mission: to serve as outside general counsel to middle-market companies and their owners; to help clients make sound business decisions; to help implement appropriate actions, in what are often difficult times; and to aid clients in planning for their futures.

Your Business:

There is no magic bullet; there is rarely one “right” course of action. There can be a series of problems, a series of answers. Yet the businessman must devise a course of action. To whom does he or she turn? Spouse or other family member? Auditor or financial adviser or banker? Employees and board members? Customers or suppliers or even the competition? Each of these sources may well have insights that are helpful—but, even as you, as a businessperson, make your tentative judgments, who is it that helps you to sort through the alternatives?

Who helps you weigh the potential effects of actions (or inaction) on your business? Who helps guide your business through the minefields of business practice, law, finance—and your own emotional response to these problems? How confident are you that the advisers to whom you turn have the depth of knowledge, experience, judgment, and commitment to your business to provide you with the kind of insights that you want. And what about those times when, having come to a decision on your own, you’d welcome a second opinion? Once the potential complexities of any business situation have been determined, there may well be a simple solution—if you have a trusted adviser in whom you can confide.

Your Business Legal Counsel:

Being your Business Legal Counsel is about winning, yet at the same time it is not just about winning. It is also about listening—understanding the client and that client’s needs, wishes and interests. It is about listening to the answers to the right questions, questions arising from the facts, from the business situation. And it is about making mistakes—and learning from them.

It is about sifting through business facts and legal considerations, about understanding the client’s business and the financial implications of various decisions. It is about the crucial intersection of law, business, risk, and opportunity. It is about combining thorough analysis with instinct, about thinking through various courses of action and their likely effect upon shareholders and owners, the business itself, its lenders, customers and suppliers, its employees. It is about the needs of the business—today’s needs and, given the rapid changes in the business climate, about tomorrow’s needs as well. It is about costs: those that are quantifiable, such as the loss of a customer or supplier, or legal and accounting fees, or investment banking fees, or settlement fees. It is also about unquantifiable costs: opportunity, emotional response, ethics and values.

It is also about benefits: they can be of many kinds. Survival, retention of old customers, identifying new customers, better financing, start-up opportunities, acquisition or sale of a business, better morale, succession planning, growth. It is about action and inaction—and change. It is about uncertainty and about probabilities: it is about balancing these factors.

It is also about history, about the events of today, and the future. It is about knowledge, skill, reasoning, and experience. It is about saying no—and yes, and suggesting ways to achieve goals. It is about learning and doing, about change, about judgment, planning and execution. And survival and growth. It is about time and money.

From the counsel’s point of view: how best to serve and achieve the client’s interest. It is about duty and trust, and delivering sound counsel in matters of consequence. Yes, counseling “how to,” then using one’s best efforts to achieve the client’s goals.

Personalized Representation:

Hubbard Business Counsel focuses on the client, his or her goals, and a thorough understanding of the business: its environment, its principals, its financial situation, all keys to providing sound advice. Once that kind of understanding is achieved, counsel and client together decide how best to approach and solve any problem. Specific problems may involve: planning for then negotiating key agreements; the sale or purchase of a business; the resolution of a dispute without litigation; business and tax planning; private securities offerings; joint venture and partnership opportunities; family succession planning; capital structuring (or re-structuring) of the business; commercial real estate matters; the structuring of compensation; etc. It may also happen that Hubbard Business Counsel will recommend the retention of other counsel when doing so serves the client’s best interests.

Background: G. William Hubbard II

Bill Hubbard has over 24 years of experience helping businesses and their owners. He established Hubbard Business Counsel in 1997, after previously having been a partner in two large Chicago law firms.  He graduated from West Point (B.S., 1973), and the Illinois Institute of Technology/Chicago-Kent College of Law (J.D., with high honors,1978) and also obtained an Illinois Certified Public Accountant certificate. He served as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army in Berlin and as an Army prosecutor in Augsburg, Germany.  He is admitted to practice law in the State of Illinois and is a member of the American Institute of CPAs, the Illinois CPA Society, the Association for Corporate Growth, and the Midwest Business Brokers and Intermediaries Association.  He is a member of the Illinois CPA Society Mergers and Acquisitions Special Interest Group Task Force and the Chicago Bar Association Business Law Mergers and Acquisitions Sub-committee. He is a former Director and Past President of the West Point Society of Chicago.  Bill lives in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago.

Bill is a past presenter (or panelist) for courses or presentations (purchase and sale of businesses; business intermediaries; buy-sell agreements; tax effects in structuring business sales; business estate planning; limited liability partnership and other kinds of business organization) sponsored by the International Business Brokers Association, the Illinois CPA Society, the Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education, the Midwest Business Brokers and Intermediaries Association, and the CPA Club.  He is co-author of the chapter on Illinois/Delaware/Nevada corporations in an Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education Handbook, and he wrote two chapters (“Adviser Engagement Letters” and “Letters of Intent and Purchase/Sale Agreements”) in Mergers and Acquisitions Handbook for Small and Midsize Companies, edited by West and Jones (New York: Wiley, 1997).