Meet John Saunders

Video Transcript

I started out in practice as a real estate lawyer, and spent seven years doing commercial real estate transactions, and made an entrepreneurial jump to work for a startup toy company. That’s about seven years into my practice. I went from there to work as in-house counsel for a local quick-service restaurant franchisee and spent three years working for a company as an in-house legal. I gained a lot of experience working for a company, hiring lawyers, working inside of a business, learning how business owners think and act, and got to talk to a lot of accountants, and working through learning about how they structure business and do business.

I consider myself an entrepreneur. I’ve worked inside businesses, and I like helping entrepreneurs solve their legal problems.

When I’m helping out entrepreneurs, a lot of times, they need help with buying and selling commercial real estate or doing a commercial real estate lease. I help them navigate that process, get it documented, and get to a closing or a lease signing, moving on and putting that behind us. A lot of times, it will also involve setting up entities for entrepreneurs for a piece of real estate or a new venture, and we do a lot of planning there for entrepreneurs. And then, finally, with entrepreneurs, there’s just a lot of contract work that comes up, and we like to be involved with contracts for entrepreneurs, helping them review, and make sure the contracts do what they want them to do.

I love being useful and the feeling of being useful to my clients and to my friends. I love helping out and solving problems. I love being an advisor to my clients and my friends, and getting a call early on in a transaction when a client is thinking about their next transaction, and getting me involved early when we’re strategizing. I love being in on the conversation early, so we can start game planning, and I really enjoy planning and strategizing and sharing my experience with my clients.

We have a great team of experienced attorneys at Avisen Legal. Every attorney has a lot of experience in their own practice area, and we help a lot of entrepreneurs in various industries. And so, if I have a client who needs something that I can’t do, I feel pretty confident that I can walk down the hall and find one of my partners or colleagues who can help us out.

At the end of a recent transaction, a client told me recently that my approach is calm and efficient. I appreciated that so much because that’s really how I try to do deals and help my clients. I’m a lawyer, and I think like a lawyer, but I also try to think like a business owner. I’ve spent time inside businesses, and I know how business owners think, and I try to always keep that in mind when offering legal advice, which is to both think like a lawyer and think like a business person.