During your summer employment you may be exposed to several different practice areas. Are any of them especially appropriate for you? To help you decide, here’s a brief overview of five different practice areas: corporate, securities, patents, labor & employment and insurance.

• Sole proprietorships
• General and limited partnerships
• Limited liability companies
• Corporations 

• Structuring deals like mergers and acquisitions or asset and stock purchases
• Organizing and choosing the types of business entities that will be most beneficial to their clients
• Counseling upper management on corporate governance issues, including shareholder rights, director and officer responsibilities and liabilities, etc.
• Helping the entities gain financing through loan transactions to resolve business and corporate legal issues
• Resolving business and corporate legal issues involving things like tax consequences of a transaction or qualifying to do business in other states

• Documenting or drafting deal-related materials, offering memos, outlining and reviewing a company’s disclosure requirements, preparing and reviewing SEC filings, and counseling a corporation or its directors on financing, raising capital and structuring a transaction—all in the context of rules and regulations promulgated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate the offering and selling of securities to the public (this always involves federal securities laws under the 1933 or 1934 Acts and sometimes involves state securities laws known as “blue sky” requirements)
• Working with the registration of securities that are to be sold to the public and the regulation of the trading of outstanding or “listed” securities, such as securities traded on stock exchanges and the over-the-counter market
• Establishing reporting requirements of securities issuers and rules governing proxy solicitations and tender offers
• Establishing the authority of the SEC
• Working with certain anti-fraud provisions
• Writing primarily to protect investors and ensure complete disclosure of accurate information about:
  • The underlying company
  • The type of investment they are purchasing
  • The value of the stock, whether purchased through an initial public offering, a stock exchange, or the over-the-counter market

• Utility—issued for a new, useful and non-obvious machine, manufacture, composition of matter, or process
• Plant—granted under the Plant Patent Act (enacted in 1930) to a person(s) who discovers and asexually reproduces new varieties of plants that are distinct and meet the other requirements of patentability, e.g., non-obviousness (a species of bacteria does not constitute a plant within the meaning of this statute)
• Design—granted on new, original, non-obvious, and ornamental designs for articles of manufacture 

• Patent prosecution—the procedure of getting a patent application approved
• Patent litigation—the procedure of appealing the denial of a patent application by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO)
• Patent infringement litigation—the legal process through which a patent owner can protect his/her rights under the patent against infringement by another
• Licensing—the process through which the owner of a patent allows another to use the patent in exchange for specified consideration (e.g., money)

• Labor law, which relates to union activities dealing with unionized workplaces and employee representation
• Employment law, which involves the rights of individual employees, as opposed to unions. Labor & employment law attorneys are litigators who represent their clients before administrative agencies or in court, argue the merits of their clients’ positions, negotiate collective bargaining contracts, participate in grievance arbitrations, and serve as counselors to their clients when it comes to employment issues

• Keeping up with the latest developments in labor law
• Advising human resources professionals on legal aspects of employment matters—recruiting, hiring and training
• Overseeing all labor matters, including downsizing, unfair labor practices, strikes, collective bargaining, etc.
• Advising on OSHA worker’s compensation, as well as Sarbanes Oxley and immigration matters
• Advising on family medical leave, as well as wage & hour discrimination, the Americans With Disabilities Act and equal pay act issues
• Managing outside counsel for contract development and litigation 

• Coverage generally involves an insurer and the insured. The insured is seeking to recover under a policy of insurance, and the central legal question is whether the insured’s policy covers the loss or liability.
• Defense refers to situations where an insurer hires counsel to defend its insured against an action brought by a third party—typically an action alleging that the insured has caused the third party to suffer bodily injury or property damage.
• Compliance involves the 50–state regulation of the business of insurance, from rates to advertising/solicitation to licensing of adjusters.

• Making rapid coverage determinations that result in the right decision faster for the policyholder and the insurance company
• Finding court interpretations of specific clauses and terms in policies, and checking policy interpretations by experts
• Understanding liability exposure of policyholder and damaged potential for a company
• Researching benchmarks for damage issues and assessing conflict issues with outside counsel
• Isolating and acting on compliance issues quickly to make changes and avoid fines

Checking statutes, insurance regulations, bulletins, and attorney general opinions across all jurisdictions, and investigating compliance questions from regulators when no regulation is directly on point

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