Laurence S Donahue

Larry Donahue is a seasoned high-tech business executive and attorney, with a focus in contracts, negotiations, business transactions, intellectual property and Internet law. He boasts over 20 years of business development and IT consulting experience. His former clients (as a consultant) ranged from small startups to the Fortune 50, including GE Capital, Bank One, IBM and Amadeus.

He held leadership positions in numerous successful enterprises, including SpaBoom, FatCow Web Hosting, Baker Robbins & Company, and Leapnet. At SpaBoom, Larry helped found this SaaS-based business from scratch, and subsequently captured 12% of the spa/salon market within 3 years. At FatCow, Larry helped turn around this web hosting company, growing its accounts from 3,000 to 30,000 within 3 years, and overseeing the acquisition of the business with a surprisingly successful valuation.

Larry holds a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering, is licensed to practice law in the States of New Mexico and Illinois, and is a registered patent attorney with the US Patent and Trademark Office. Larry appeared on the New Mexico Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” in 2003 and 2004.

In 2011, Larry founded Law 4 Small Business (L4SB), after almost 15 years as a Chief Operating Officer and Corporate Counsel for a number of high-tech companies and startups.

As a corporate counsel, Larry dealt with three certainties in his career.

First, your typical small business owner or executive doesn’t have the time, training or patience to consider the legal impacts of his or her daily decisions, and how they could transform into costly mistakes for the future. Or, how the right decisions around legal issues could create wonderful returns, profits and/or cost-savings down the road.

Second, your typical law firm loves to provide legal services to businesses, yet oftentimes demands retainer fees, won’t be available after hours, and almost never accepts credit cards. As a corporate counsel, Larry found it difficult to find attorneys who really understood the needs of business, and would be willing to lose a few battles for the sake of winning the war (for some attorneys, the need to “zealously represent their client” makes them inflexible and difficult to work with, at best).

Third, legal representation early in the game (like good medicine) helps avoid costly problems in the future. For example, many business owners don’t stop to consider that every contract placed in front of them is negotiable (i.e. even a lease). By negotiating more favorable terms now, a business can potentially save thousands when the relationship ends.

Therefore, L4SB was born to address what Larry sees as shortcomings to legal representation for small business.