Dear Colleagues:

By way of short introduction, I am an entrepreneurial attorney with a firm and other businesses I founded in my home town of Austin, TX.

We founded the Entrepreneurial Law Bar Association (EBA global) to bring together the entrepreneurial attorney community to enhance our practices and our ability to serve our clients.

This year, we launched our CLE initiative with our co-founder and executive director Julene Franki, formerly CLE Director for the American Bar Association/American Law Institute (ALI-ABA) and the Texas Bar Association.

We had a terrific meeting in May, and went to drinks afterwards. We heard so much positive feedback about the networking and CLE being provided by the EBA.

Following up on this momentum, we want to invite you to join us for our June 22, via webcast and in-person for our membership meeting and CLE ““Right Sized” Legal: Understanding your Client Needs.”

Our CLE speakers are terrific attorneys including Austin, Wilson Sonsini partner, Scott Craig and Kevin Vela, name partner in Dallas and Austin firm, Vela Wood.

As a co-founder and Board Member of the EBA, I want to tell you about what led me to join the EBA and the value I have found in it. As a life-long entrepreneur with 20+ years as an entrepreneurial law attorney, I have spent the majority of my career helping to build my clients’ businesses and the entrepreneurial ecosystems needed to help them. I have focused on helping entrepreneurs succeed in many endeavors, and am privileged to be a part of Austin’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, and helping to build that ecosystem through my law firm and SKU, the consumer products accelerator.

As an attorney though I wanted help build our entrepreneurial attorney community, to bring together smart and innovative attorney leaders and provide us CLE and other services that only a bar association could provide.  At our meeting in May, audience members asked several times if there were organizations in the entrepreneurial resource ecosystem that supported lawyers. I told them:  not yet.  That is why we started the EBA. I love our CLE, which is relevant for entrepreneurial law attorneys. I have already learned from colleagues and see the benefits derived from getting together with other entrepreneurial law attorneys to support the larger entrepreneurial community, identify best practices and support our practice success and that of our clients.  As lawyers, if we get better at supporting the success of entrepreneur clients, more of them will succeed. In our entrepreneurial resource ecosystem we have discovered that more success means more start-ups, more investments and more work for lawyers.

There are many benefits for an EBA member, and we are just getting started.  Probably one of the best member benefits is your ability to join in the development of relevant EBA projects and products that can help you practice law.

A key benefit is our membership meeting, which offers networking and CLE.  Always included free to members, membership and membership meetings are open to all at this time.

Another benefit is free newsletters, with relevant materials, including this one from Ed Cavazos from Pillsbury about “Legal Counsel from Start-Up to Exit.”

Ed discusses challenges to representing early stage companies including topics like: fee arrangements., formation issues, competing/client issues, stock options issues, employee issues, outside relationships, funding issues, intellectual property issues, regulatory concerns, international issues, and litigation issues.

If you like what you read, sign up for the entire CLE program available on-demand, with another great member benefit:  CLE discounts.

A complimentary .5 hour CLE program is available to members right now from our April and May membership meetings.

Again, we invite you to sign up and join us on June 22.  Come and meet us and join our round table discussion either in person or via video webinar.

Best Regards,

Shari Wynne Ressler, Co-founder of RWR Legal, SKU and the EBA