Morsel Law or a large firm: an honest comparison

If your food or beverage company needs FDA regulatory counsel, you have real options. Several excellent national firms have deep food and beverage practices — Husch Blackwell, Alston & Bird, Michael Best and others do serious work in this space, and for certain matters they are the right call.

Here is how we would actually think about it if we were you.

Where a large firm is the better choice

We would rather tell you this up front than have you find out three months in.

You are in litigation, or about to be. A consumer class action over a label claim is a litigation matter. It needs a litigation department, e-discovery infrastructure, and the capacity to staff a case that may run for years. We are a transactional and regulatory practice. If you are being sued, you want a firm built for that.

You are doing a large M&A transaction. A nine-figure acquisition with a real estate portfolio, a multi-jurisdiction employment population and an antitrust question needs a firm with all of those departments under one roof.

You need a nationally recognized name on the file. Sometimes the audience for your counsel is your board, your acquirer, or your insurer. That is a legitimate reason to hire a brand, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

You have a genuine crisis with parallel workstreams. A recall with simultaneous FDA, state AG, insurance and press dimensions needs depth we do not have.

Where we are the better choice

You want to know what it costs before you agree to it. Our label reviews are $749 to $1,299. FDA facility registration is $799. Federal trademark filings run $899 to $1,999. Those numbers are published on this website. At a national firm, the same work is billed hourly at partner and associate rates, and the number you get in advance is a range.

Your matter is well-defined regulatory work. Label review, facility registration, FSVP, import compliance, structure/function claim analysis, TTB licensing, trademark filing. This is what we do all day. It is scoped, repeatable work, and a firm structured around bet-the-company litigation is not built to price it efficiently.

You want the same lawyer every time. At a large firm your matter is staffed. The partner you met at the pitch may not be the person doing the work, and the associate who learned your product line may rotate off. Here, you work with Patrick.

You are a startup or a small to mid-size company. This is the real difference. At a national firm, a company doing $3 million in revenue is a small client, and small clients get the attention small clients get. That is not a criticism of those firms — it is arithmetic. Food and beverage companies of that size are our practice, not our overflow.

You want counsel who has sat on your side of the table. Patrick served as general counsel of two food manufacturers. That is a different perspective from having advised food manufacturers as outside counsel. It means understanding that the legally optimal answer and the answer that works with a production schedule are not always the same one, and that you need the second one.

The background, briefly

Patrick holds an LL.M. in Agricultural and Food Law from the University of Arkansas — the only program of its kind in the United States. He was also general counsel to two food manufacturers and practiced in the transactional and commercial groups at Sullivan & Worcester in Boston, Bass, Berry & Sims in Nashville, and Dickinson Wright in Detroit. Before law school he served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps and is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The national firm experience matters here for an unglamorous reason: we know what that work product looks like and what it costs, because we produced it.

What "outside general counsel" means in practice

Some clients do not need a specific project. They need someone who knows the business and can be called.

We serve as outside general counsel to food and beverage companies that are not large enough to justify a full-time in-house lawyer but are too complex to operate without one. That covers the regulatory work, the commercial contracts, the co-packer agreements, the brand protection, and the questions that start with "this is probably nothing, but."

We also work with law firms and attorneys who do not regularly practice in this industry and have a client with a food, beverage or supplement question. That is a common and perfectly sensible arrangement.

The short version

For litigation, large transactions and true crises, hire a large firm. For regulatory compliance, labeling, imports, licensing and brand protection at a food or beverage company, we are likely to be faster, cheaper, and more attentive — and you will know the price in advance.

If you are unsure which category you are in, tell us what you are dealing with. If the answer is that you need a bigger firm, we will say so and, where we can, point you toward one.