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Sophia Lau Provides Expert Advice in July 2013 California Lawyer
Category: News, Press, Publications | Sunday, July 7th, 2013 | Comments Off on Sophia Lau Provides Expert Advice in July 2013 California Lawyer
Sophia Lau is featured in the July 2013 edition of California Lawyer. Her article “Duty To Cooperate” discusses McGrory v. Applied Signal Tech., Inc., 212 Cal. App. 4th 1510 (2013), the recent California appellate decision which says an employee is obligated to assist his or her employer in the investigation of another employee’s discrimination claim.
Mary Kaufman Leads CAMP Workshop
Category: Events | Thursday, June 20th, 2013 | Comments Off on Mary Kaufman Leads CAMP Workshop
Mary C.G. Kaufman recently led a workshop for creative entrepreneurs at CAMP, an innovative business conference, entitled “Legal 101: What You Need to Know About Starting and Operating Your Business,” which covered topics such as corporate structures, intellectual property, funding/financing and employment issues.
The Ten Commandments Of Crowdfunding
Category: News, Press, Publications | Thursday, May 16th, 2013 | Comments Off on The Ten Commandments Of Crowdfunding
Forbes recently published “The Ten Commandments of Crowdfunding” by Bryan Sullivan and Stephen Ma.
With the success of the Veronica Mars and Garden State-sequel Kickstarter campaigns, it appears that the crowdfunding business model has made its way to mainstream Hollywood. While crowdfunding certainly has advantages, including giving filmmakers more creative control over their projects, this business model is open to potential claims of fraud, misappropriation, conversion and embezzlement, which lead to the risk of financial exposure in the form of adverse judgments and the cost of litigation, and can potentially stop the project. In order to minimize risk, people using the crowdfunding business model should first consult an attorney, and follow what Sullivan & Ma have coined as the “Ten Commandments of Crowdfunding.”
Read the full article here.
Bryan Sullivan Named Media and Entertainment “Rising Star”
Category: Press | Thursday, May 16th, 2013 | Comments Off on Bryan Sullivan Named Media and Entertainment “Rising Star”
Rising Star: Early Sullivan’s Bryan Sullivan
By Bill Donahue
Law360, New York (April 11, 2013, 7:16 PM ET) — Working with slew of celebrities and professional athletes — after successfully founding a multimillion-dollar law firm and a legal aid nonprofit — was more than enough to earn Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae LLP’s Bryan Sullivan a spot among Law360’s group of the four top young media and entertainment attorneys.
Indeed, as with most of the under-40 attorneys named to Law360’s Rising Star list, Sullivan has an impressive client list. In the past few years, he’s handled cases for clients including pop singer Miley Cyrus, actress Whoopi Goldberg, Lionsgate Films Inc. and Major League Baseball star Robinson Cano.
Serving as what he describes as a “problem solver,” Sullivan handles a broad swath of cases for his clients, from entertainment contracts to intellectual property to a criminal case against a man convicted of trespassing at Cyrus’ home.
But in the case of the 37-year-old Sullivan, some of his biggest accomplishments in his career have been the organizations he’s helped start, not the cases he’s closed.
In mid-2010, Sullivan, Eric Early and three other partners left Los Angeles-based entertainment firm Glaser Weil Fink Jacobs Howard & Shapiro LLP and founded Early Sullivan. Three years later, the firm is thriving and has doubled in size to 20 attorneys.
According to Early, a lot of that is attributable to Sullivan, who he said has “a great business mind.” “There are so many things that come into play in running a law firm that most lawyers working for bigger firms really never have to address directly and on a regular basis,” Early said. “We have to have a Bryan Sullivan in this firm to make it hum like it’s been humming.”
Breaking away from Glaser Weil — an entirely amicable split, by the way — was a risk for Sullivan. It’s much easier for a general counsel or a celebrity manager to send their work to the big firm, to the older attorney with more experience. If someone like that loses a case, it’s easier to explain.
But looking back — one successful boutique firm later — Sullivan said the move was the right one. “I really feel that if I stayed at a big firm, the opportunity wouldn’t be there for me,” he said. “I’d always be under the rubric of some big name 60-something attorney with a 35-year career of success, and nobody would actually see me.
“I felt that now was the time to take that risk and start building my own reputation.”
Sullivan also helped his colleague Daniel J. Bramzon — another Glaser Weil alum — found and run BASTA, a nonprofit group aimed at helping tenets assert their rights in landlord disputes through aggressive litigation.
One of the group’s major accomplishments has been to start demanding jury trials during eviction proceedings, something low-income, unrepresented tenets might not know to do. The prospect of a full jury trials meant landlords and, more importantly eviction attorneys, had to more thoroughly consider whether they were being fair in the process.
“We changed the way evictions are done in Los Angeles,” Sullivan said about BASTA.
Trying to explain his partner’s early success in representing high-profile clients and in helping start their firm, Early said Sullivan has a “thoughtful, creative, imaginative and exacting legal mind.”
“When you have somebody like that — who not only gets along well with clients but can come up with very innovative and spot on solutions that other people may not be able to think of — you’ve got a special person,” he said.
Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae LLP Claims One of the “Top Defense Verdicts of the Year” by Daily Journal
Category: Awards, News, Press | Wednesday, March 13th, 2013 | Comments Off on Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae LLP Claims One of the “Top Defense Verdicts of the Year” by Daily Journal
Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae LLP was honored by the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journal, California’s premier daily legal publication, for its trial victory in Central Pacific Bank v. Fidelity National Title.
A copy of the article in which Early Sullivan was honored can be found by clicking the PDF icon on the right.
Los Angeles Daily Journal Features Eric Early in Cover Story
Category: News, Press | Monday, March 11th, 2013 | Comments Off on Los Angeles Daily Journal Features Eric Early in Cover Story
Eric Early is one of the managing partners of law firms featured in Ryne Hodkowski’s Daily Journal cover story about the bright future for smaller firms. Download the PDF on the right to read the full article.
Sophia Lau Quoted in Law 360
Category: News, Press | Friday, March 8th, 2013 | Comments Off on Sophia Lau Quoted in Law 360
Chinese RE Investments Require Cultural, Tax Savvy
Law360, New York (March 08, 2013, 8:52 PM ET) — With rumors of a housing bubble swirling and values down across China, real estate attorneys expect to see more and more wealthy Chinese families and corporations looking to the U.S. to diversify their real estate holdings, bringing with them unique tax, liability and cultural issues.
Chinese sovereign wealth funds and high net worth individuals have been increasingly making their way to the U.S. real estate market over the last several years, but experts say that worries of a potential Chinese housing bubble — borne out in dipping stocks — are pushing even more investors to put their money into U.S. property.
“Our properties present a better value for them right now; it makes sense for them to put their money here,” Sophia Lau, a partner at Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae LLP said Friday.
No other recent deal may have exemplified this more than the reported arrangement between a group of Chinese real estate investors led by the family of billionaire Chinese CEO Zhang Xin with owners of the General Motors building in Manhattan for a 40 percent stake.
Zhang Xin hasn’t commented on the deal, but sources have said they expect it to value the 50- story building at a massive $3.4 billion.
This could be a harbinger of things to come, experts say, and while many are thrilled by the prospect of more, and in some cases bigger, deals, they say it also means more complicated structures and tax headaches and brings about a necessity for cultural sensitivity that might not exist in other deals.
In China, transactions are handled differently than they are in the U.S., and it can be easy to offend someone and potentially spoil a deal before it’s begun if the attorneys involved haven’t done their homework, according to Lau.
The aggressive nature with which many U.S. deals are approached and negotiated can be off- putting to a Chinese investor; the practice of laying all of one’s expectations for a deal out on the table at the outset is not accepted in China, where experts say investors like to get to know potential sellers and become comfortable with them before getting down to the details.
The speed with which U.S. deals — real estate transactions in particular — generally take place can also be off-putting, according to John Opar, a partner at Shearman & Sterling LLP.
“Those deals move very quickly. Sometimes people have to do diligence in a very short period of time, have to negotiate a contract literally overnight, and I think that is probably something that is not the norm in the home jurisdiction,” he said.
When it does come down to the details of the deal, McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP partner Andrea Chang said Chinese investors are generally worried about two main things: privacy and liability.
“They don’t want everybody to know who they are or how much money they have,” she said.
This is not an uncommon refrain from high net worth investors, but for cultural reasons it can almost be considered a staple of any real estate deal involving a Chinese investor, Chang said.
This generally means hiding the investor’s name by structuring the deal so that they buy the property through a trust with a generic name or through a limited liability company. LLCs are preferable over corporations, according to Chang, because there is more flexibility and there are better creditor protections.
When an LLC is registered with the secretary of state in the state where the property is located, however, the LLC officer’s identity is often exposed. Attorneys say they often create a structure in which a state LLC owns the real estate and a Delaware LLC acts as its manager, disguising fully the name of the Chinese individual, family or fund.
On the issue of liability, an LLC is also the best vehicle through which the make the investment from a Chinese perspective because it gives creditors zero basis for piercing the corporate veil, providing better asset protection, Chang said.
The biggest potential source of complex work in a real estate investment deal involving a Chinese player, however, is likely working around the tax issues that surround foreign investment, experts say.
There’s a flat tax of 30 percent on investments made by nonresident aliens, or foreigners with no green card who aren’t present in the U.S. for at least 183 days in a three-year period or 31 days in the current year. The tax applies to fixed or determinable income not connected to a trade or business, so attorneys on these types of deals say they often find themselves working out a structure that will allow a lesser tax burden.
Chinese investors typically aren’t looking for one-off deals, experts say, and they often invest in a piece of property in order to improve it and lease it later. Improvement plans can convey active investment status and free up deductions not available to passive property investors.
The number of real estate deals in major U.S. cities is likely to continue to rise, experts say, and those looking to take advantage of the trend should be sure they’re not only prepared to jump through complex liability and tax hoops but also have a sense of the cultural variations.
“It helps for a firm or attorney to either be familiar with those issues or have people of Chinese descent or who speak Chinese on their team to help facilitate that process,” Lau said.
Source: Kaitlin Ugolik, Law360
Trump may have trouble collecting on $5 million orangutan bet
Category: News, Press | Monday, February 11th, 2013 | Comments Off on Trump may have trouble collecting on $5 million orangutan bet
Bryan Sullivan was quoted in Joseph Ax’s article titled “Trump may have trouble collecting on $5 million orangutan bet,” which appeared in Reuters. The full article can be found here.
It also appeared in The Globe and Mail.
Homeowners facing foreclosures should be wary of scams
Category: News, Press | Monday, February 4th, 2013 | Comments Off on Homeowners facing foreclosures should be wary of scams
Scott Gizer was featured in Lew Sichelman’s article titled “Homeowners facing foreclosures should be wary of scams,” which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on February 3, 2013. The article discusses how the government is coming down hard on swindlers who cheat owners willing to try almost anything to avoid foreclosure. The article can be found here.
YouTube May Begin Nickel-and-Diming Viewers
Category: News, Press | Thursday, January 31st, 2013 | Comments Off on YouTube May Begin Nickel-and-Diming Viewers
Bryan Sullivan was quoted in Erika Morphy’s E-Commerce News article titled “YouTube May Begin Nickel-and-Diming Viewers,” which discussed the possibility of YouTube charging for some of it content.
The full article can be found here.