In July, 2012, Emily Campbell, The Campbell Firm PLLC’s Managing Member, organized and delivered several important teleconferences as part of the Firm’s 10th Anniversary public outreach efforts. Among the programs: “Making and Enforcing Contracts,” a teleconference that focused on written business agreements and include a discussion of the concepts of consideration, the level of detail that should be in a contract, whether one attorney can draft neutrally if you’ve worked out all the details, what does all the boilerplate mean, what happens if one party doesn’t perform, and litigating and settling disputes arising out of a contract. Ms. Campbell delivered a similar live, in-person lecture on that topic to the WeWork community, which is especially focused on entrepreneurship, which the Firm whole-heartedly supports.
Ms. Campbell also delivered a separate lecture on “Whom Did You Hire: An Employee or Independent Contractor?” to the WeWork community. That seminar focused on the classification of workers as employees and independent contractors and the factors that the government considers in determining a worker’s status. There was a discussion of the consequences of misclassification, and there was an overview of the pitfalls of misclassifying a worker from an intellectual property perspective. “Work made for hire” concepts and putting procedures in place to have employees and independent contractors sign agreements memorializing their transfer of intellectual property interests to the company they are working with were also addressed.
“I really enjoy educating others,” Ms. Campbell said. Ms. Campbell plans more such lectures for 2014, in addition to the professional time she has committed to as an Adjunct Professor at New York Law School, where she teaches Advising Entrepreneurs and other courses (depending on the semester), as well as her volunteer activities with Columbia University’s Lang Center for Entrepreneurship, where she primarily invests time with students in connection with their early-stage business ventures.