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Enterprise Counsel for Business Families
We help business families navigate ownership, succession, governance, transactions, and major transitions—developing the strategy, bringing the right advisors together, and carrying it through legal implementation.
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Major transitions rarely involve just one problem.
In many deals, legal execution drifts away from the intended structure and strategy.
A succession, acquisition, ownership change, or estate planning decision can quickly involve tax, legal, financial, governance, and family considerations. Each advisor may understand their piece. Someone still needs to hold the whole.
Most business owners work with multiple advisors, typically including tax, CPAs, M&A advisors, investment bankers, and/or financial advisors to configure different aspects of their deal.
Then, as the last step, engage attorneys for legal execution — to prepare documents for the transaction.
This hand-off is often where things start to get lost in translation.
Advisors and attorneys each bring specialized expertise in their respective domains but they often don’t speak each other’s languages.
Advisors are not equipped to engage in the technical conversations attorneys require, and attorneys are not positioned to capture the full strategic intent behind prior decisions— causing misalignment between your intention and what ultimately gets implemented.
The result is legal documents end up re-configuring structures that took months or even years to design. New issues often surface along the way too. This extends timelines and reopens negotiations — causing the deal to drift off course.
We want you and your advisors to avoid this frustration.
That’s why we created the Enterprise Counsel role.
That’s the role of Enterprise Counsel.
We help business families step back before jumping into a technical solution.
We identify what actually needs to happen, develop a strategy that can be implemented, and determine which legal, tax, financial, and other specialists are needed to carry it out.
Then we stay with the strategy through implementation—coordinating the team, resolving issues as they arise, and making sure each piece continues to serve the larger objective. Our focus stays on the whole: growing the enterprise, protecting what the family has built, and keeping the family together.
We’ll capture your strategic intent before any documents get drafted. Then, ensure execution stays aligned, issues are resolved efficiently, and risk does not unintentionally shift as final agreements are documented.
We’ll assess the proposed transaction to confirm liabilities, exposures, and protections are intentionally allocated
This includes term sheets, definitive documents, and diligence processes — so risk does not shift unintentionally as documents are negotiated and finalized.
We ensure the transaction works across legal, tax, and finance without creating unintended exposure. We can help assemble additional specialists if needed for your deal.
This approach creates alignment to ensure the value you've built is protected, counterpart relationships remain intact, and your deal concludes with clarity rather than surprises.
Words from our clients
Two connected ways we help business families.
Some families need help deciding what should happen before legal work begins. Others already know the direction and need experienced counsel to implement it. We work across both.
Family Business Advisory
For families who need to work through ownership, succession, governance, or stakeholder alignment before the legal structure is clear.
Legal Services
For owners who already know the direction and need counsel to structure, document, negotiate, and implement it.
The right expertise, brought in when
your transition requires it.
Complex ownership transitions rarely stay within one discipline. Estate counsel, tax advisors, valuation experts, wealth managers, and specialist attorneys may all need to contribute at different points in the process.
We have built relationships with independent advisors and specialist counsel across these disciplines. When your transition requires expertise beyond our scope, we help identify the right professionals, bring them into the process, and coordinate their work with the broader legal strategy.
You remain anchored by one lead legal relationship: your Enterprise Counsel.
Sophia Cizmarik
Counsel
Estate Planning and Administration
Advises business families on customized estate planning, including incapacity planning, probate avoidance, and trust administration, with attention to tax efficiency and multigenerational asset preservation.
Craig S. Redler, TEP
Counsel
Asset Protection Planning
Advises high-net-worth families on domestic and international asset-protection planning, drawing on experience with trusts, trustees, and jurisdictions in the United States and abroad.
Lou‑Anthony P. Limon
Counsel
Marital Agreements and
Family Law
Advises business‑owning and high‑net‑worth families on prenuptial and postnuptial agreements and related family law matters, with a focus on protecting family enterprises and multigenerational wealth when relationships change.
Meet your Enterprise Counsel
Yuki Ku, Esq., TEP
Affiliations:
- Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners (STEP)
- Mount Diablo Estate Planning Council Member
- Family Firm Institute (FFI)
- Professional Advisor Council, San Francisco Foundation
- Board Chair & Director, Barnabas Group Bay Area
I don't just advise from 30,000 feet and leave you with a deck - I am a deal attorney who gets into the weeds with you, align your deal team, and drive technical legal execution through closing.
You do not get unlimited attempts at ownership transitions.
There is one window to protect control, preserve value, and set the next generation up to succeed. If done right, the founder’s legacy and the enterprise endure; if not, valuation declines, key talents leave, and instability sets in.
I’ve worked on more than 200 acquisitions, investments, and complex strategic transactions — as a former corporate and M&A counsel to Fortune 500 companies and later as Head of Legal for a venture-backed company recognized on the Time 100 Most Influential Companies list.
In my experience, ownership transitions do not fail for lack of capable advisors. They fail when strategy and execution drift apart.
In strong enterprises, each transaction fits into a larger strategy. Ownership changes, financing decisions, governance design, and succession steps are not isolated events.They are connected moves over time. Someone is responsible for seeing how each decision shapes the next and whether it advances the long-term direction of the business.
In closely held business transitions, that role is often missing. Work happens in pieces — a valuation here, estate documents there, a financing effort, a governance update — but without a cohesive strategy holding it all together across time.
Enterprise Counsel is the role I created to fill that gap for owners and their advisors. I bridge strategic intention and legal implementation across succession, ownership transitions, M&A, and restructuring. I serve as quarterback across corporate, tax, estate, and transactional counsel alongside financial and banking partners, ensuring each move fits into a coherent enterprise strategy.
My role is to hold the strategy steady from first conversation through implementation, so the transition preserves value, aligns control and economics, and sets the next generation up to succeed.
Designed to support business owners in moments of change.
Our services are a fit for when you find yourself at any of these milestones:
You're getting into an M&A transaction
You’re navigating a partner buy-in or buy-out
You're restructuring ownership or planning an internal succession
You need support for strategic investments, collaborations, or joint ventures
You’re putting intercompany, ownership, or governance relationships in place as part of a broader transition
The best time to call us is when both sides want a deal. We can guide you through the entire process from structuring the term sheet through closing. If you already have a term sheet or draft documents, we can guide you through negotiating the definitive agreements and closing the deal.
