Growing Need for Transactional Lawyers Who Can Represent Worker-Cooperatives and Union-Coops | Emory’s Transactional Law Conference

CUNY Law professor, Carmen Huertas Noble, and www.1worker1vote.org co-founder, is going to lead a panel on “Educating the Transactional Lawyer of Tomorrow: the Growing Need for Transactional Lawyers who can Represent Worker-Cooperatives and Union-Coops” at the Fourth Biennial Conference on Transactional Education, to be held at Emory Law School in Atlanta on June 6-7, 2014. Here is the panel summary:

“Two of the most promising structural alternatives are worker-cooperatives and union-coops. There is a strong national and growing movement of both advocates and government officials from California to Jackson, Mississippi to New York to create more worker-cooperatives and union-coops and bring them to scale. Advocates and governments officials are looking at successful models here and abroad and exploring funding worker-cooperatives and union-coop incubators, making cooperatives preferred contractors in a city’s procurement process and helping cooperatives better access Small Business Services. Thus, the very likely increasing number of cooperatives will require more transactional lawyers to become familiar with cooperative models, and labor law when cooperatives wants to unionize, in order to optimize formation and governance processes. More lawyers will need to understand state cooperative laws, and in states that do not have cooperative laws, lawyers will need to learn how to adapt other corporate structures such as limited liability companies to capture cooperative governance principles and financial arrangements. Transactional lawyers who understand cooperative principles and financial arrangements will also be primed to help draft legislation in support of worker ownership. Such legislation would include giving cooperatives a preference in government procurement processes and providing greater access to Small Business Services and would require transactional lawyers to help their clients successfully navigate these processes. Cooperatives may become the new LLC in terms of framing popular entity formation options. The panel will address how worker-cooperatives and particularly union-coops offer a better alternative to the corporate structures that dominate our economy today. It will highlight successful models of worker ownership here and abroad that provide a potential blueprint for building a more inclusive shared economy in the U.S. The panel will also address the challenge in bringing worker ownership to scale in the U.S. and the growing role of transactional lawyers in helping clients meet these challenges and implement their success.”