By ibaadmin | Published:
September 28, 2010
Accounting, Finance, Marketing and Management for Recent Law Grads
Mark S. Farha
06-02-2010
A lack of formal business training may adversely impact recent legal graduates’ practices in two ways. Lawyers entering solo practices or small firms that must manage their own practices will lack the knowledge base to do so effectively. Lawyers representing businesses will be less effective [...]
I am a member of the American Business Appraisers National Network, a consortium of independent valuation firms. At a recent meeting, we discussed our experience with using the new Ibbotson 10wxyz size premium data.
The group was fairly skeptical of the data for the following reasons:
1. We are not sure that the data are adjusted to [...]
One cause of the Revolutionary War was Britain’s levy of taxes on its colonies. This led to the protest of “no taxation without representation.”
The appraisal analogy is “no valuation without representation.” Here, a representation is information provided to us by someone else which we rely on, sometimes without being able to verify it.
Most [...]
It is very rare that I complete a fair market value-based appraisal report that develops all three valuation approaches. Less rarely do I develop multiple methods (e.g., public and private guideline transactions) under a given approach.
(Right off the bat, I have to cite an exception. In the Market Approach, if there have been prior [...]
My very witty estate and trust attorney has come up with a great way to explain the strategies clients can use reduce the taxable values of estate assets. He tells them they can “squeeze ‘em, freeze ‘em, or give ‘em, and please ‘em!”
Squeezing values involves transfers of minority interests at valuation discounts.
Freezing values involves [...]
When we are discussing an engagement with a potential client, there is a natural tension between salesmanship and objectivity – getting the job and doing it right. We have to persuade the client to hire us by giving them reasons to do so. But we have to do the job following strict standards [...]
This deceptively simple question has a complicated answer!
Let’s begin with a simplifying assumption: a private company will acquire another private company in an exchange of stock, and the merged firm will also be private. When any of them is public, a host of complications (such as insider information and public company stock [...]
I’ve blogged in the past about how important it is not to get carried away by individual court case verdicts, and to concentrate only on superior court opinions (e.g. from the Tax Court) that change, challenge, or establish precedent. A good example of that would be the Tax Court’s Gross case opinion that put [...]
In a recent well-publicized opinion, a high-ranking judge sneered at the business valuation profession’s choice of 1926 as the starting date from which to compile market rate of return data, saying that there was nothing special about that year except it was “when Marilyn Monroe was born.” His implication was that this was a [...]
