Practice Areas
Business Services for Design Professionals
Powell Trachtman serves our design professional clients in virtually every aspect of their business lives, nationally and internationally. By combining our design professional expertise with our expertise in commercial litigation, business planning and transactions, estate and tax planning, real estate, and employment law, we provide an efficient and coordinated approach to the issues our design professional clients face.
For example:
- We are regularly engaged to negotiate and draft contracts between architects and engineers and their clients, ranging from local projects to projects of national and international prominence. Powell Trachtman was responsible for the design agreements for most of the new professional stadia constructed in the past several years in the northeastern United States, as well as major buildings in UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Moscow and St Petersburg, China and other locations throughout the world.
- We develop and implement business structures and solutions that effectively accommodate the needs of design professional firms, now and for the long term. We handle joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, shareholder/partnership agreements, employment agreements, leases, financing transactions, and much more;
- We represent design professionals of all types in professional licensing and business qualification matters;
- We represent design professionals in breach of contract and payment issues;
- We represent design professionals in intellectual property matters including, for instance, the unique issues involving CAD and electronic design documents;
- We create and draft the succession plans, and the personal estate and tax plans, that help design professionals retain the wealth they create;
- We represent design professionals in array of compliance issues, such as affirmative action, federal acquisition regulations, overtime and employment practices matters.
Powell Trachtman also represents and advises trade associations that service design professionals, we are engaged to draft and critique legislation that affects the design professional community, and we present seminars throughout the country on topics affecting design professionals. Powell Trachtman attorneys authored the Pennsylvania chapter for Aspen's State-By-State Guide to Construction Contracts and Claims.
Powell Trachtman attorneys serve as General Counsel to AIA Pennsylvania, sit on the Board of Directors of the Pennsylvania Tri-State Chapter of the Design-Build Institute of America, and they are legal advisors to Pennsylvania Society of Professional Engineers, the American Council of Engineering Companies of Pennsylvania and numerous local chapters of the AIA.
