Two of the founding members of NCBA CLUSA’s network of legal and accounting professionals who serve the cooperative community—Jason Wiener, Esq. of Jason Wiener, P.C. and Linda D. Phillips, Esq. of Phillips Law Offices, LLC—are collaborating to expand legal services to startups and businesses exploring ownership transitions. The two cooperative attorneys recently co-founded Colorado Cooperative Developers (CCD) and sent the following joint press release:
The coming wave of business ownership transitions has been called the “silver tsunami.” Two key dynamics at play make the launch of Colorado Cooperative Developers (“CCD”) opportune: (1) the fast growth of purpose-built, mission-driven start-up formations; and (2) mature business transitions now underway, which translate to the largest wealth transfer in human history. Against this backdrop, growth in the “sharing economy” and renewed focus on worker-ownership are re-shaping the conventional wisdom that business’ sole function is to maximize shareholder value. The cooperative is an age-old business model with social equity and environmental sustainability at its core.
“I felt called to this work after feeling demoralized by the relatively slow pace of progress that most impact and environmental litigation advances, and after working as an in house general counsel for one of Colorado’s most well known employee-owned businesses,” says Jason Wiener, Esq., co-founder of CCD. He goes on to describe his passion to “apply this inherently sustainable and socially responsible business model to new start-up concepts and to preserve good jobs in the face of business ownership transitions.” Jason Wiener is excited to use the cooperative model to address many vexing social and environmental challenges in a way that considers the interests of multiple stakeholders.
Linda D. Phillips, Esq., also a co-founder of CCD, explains that she “has worked within the cooperative community in Colorado for many years and has enjoyed bringing her experience with business planning, financial planning and cooperative formation and transactional work to develop creative solutions for Colorado’s business community and entrepreneurs.” Linda’s experience ranges from working with agricultural, telecommunications, producer, worker and consumer cooperatives, as well as standard business entity models.
CCD is a collaboration between the law practices of two long-time friends and colleagues. While their two respective law practices will remain distinct, the CCD platform will be used to educate interested business owners, sustainable community organizer-developers and entrepreneurs about the possibilities of the cooperative model and to brand a broad suite of services the two attorney-developers provide. CCD will allow the two principals to continue providing the cooperative community with high quality legal services as well as related business planning, financing and capitalization planning, organizational and cultural development and governance services. More information about CCD can be found at www.ccd.coop.