Wisconsin Business Law and Litigation
A blog dedicated to Wisconsin business law and business litigation matters, authored by Chris Moander of the Moander Law Firm.

Y Combinator and The Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students are sponsoring a Startup School for programmers out there eager to make their mark on the business world.

Y Combinator is a venture capital firm specializing in tech/web funding and based in both San Francisco and Cambridge, MA. I learned about them when they started up and they have certainly grown in size and influence since then. The Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students is a Stanford student group dedicated to boots-on-the-ground approaches to business creation.

If you are really into technology and startups, you’ll notice that Mark Zuckerberg graces the School’s homepage, hinting at the kinds of minds and attitudes the School hopes to assist. Marc Andreesen is set to speak at the event, hearkening back to the days of Netscape domination in the browser wars (and my first appreciation of just how cool the web could be). Also, David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner at 37Signals, a company that produces tools many business currently use for project management, client/customer management, and real-time chatting.

If you can justify the associated costs (the School itself is free), I would highly recommend attending - you could discover your funding angel or meet your future business partner.

Hat tip - Ryan Roberts at The Startup Lawyer

As a follow-up to my post on cultural barriers to contract formation, the Small Business Times reported that Wisconsin officially topped a billion dollars of exports to China. Well done! Further, out of the top five nations to which exports are sent, three of those nations are non-english speaking - 3.8 billion dollars of exports in Wisconsin are affected by significant language and cultural barriers. Perhaps it is time for all of us Wisconsin business attorneys to buy some language software and diversify our tongues?

Having attended law school in Oklahoma and thus been exposed to the Texas Bar, I have to hand it to the Texas Young Lawyers Association. They offer several tools for the practitioner but the crowning jewel is the “Ten Minute Mentor” series. One has to watch the state-specific law aspects of any presentation, but these lectures are wonderful and incredibly useful. The speakers almost always come off as (1) knowledgeable, (2) professional, and (3) passionate about what they do as evidenced by the detail and concision with which they present their material. I recommend that any and all practitioners check the site out.

I participated in TYLA’s trial competition while in law school, which is cosponsored with the American College of Trial Lawyers. I was coached by an outstanding and accomplished attorney who taught me volumes about trial lawyering. I think TYLA has a good thing going and hope they continue to produce valuable tools for the profession.