Not-For-Profit

Not-for-profit organizations face significant challenges, from recent changes in New York’s Not-for-Profit Corporation Law to declining government funding to increased competition for private philanthropy.

Phillips Lytle’s Not-For-Profit Practice Team takes an interdisciplinary approach to counseling our not-for-profit clients on these challenges. Our team includes attorneys with experience in advising not-for-profit organizations on formation, structure, governance, directors’ and officers’ liability insurance and indemnification, tax, executive compensation, labor and employment, tax-exempt bond financing, litigation, leases, real estate and asset acquisitions and sales, joint ventures, mergers, and dissolutions.

Phillips Lytle’s attorneys have many years of experience working with charitable, cultural, service-oriented, educational and health care organizations, as well as social welfare organizations and trade or business associations. We represent organizations ranging from small startups to large, established institutions. Our attorneys have practical first-hand knowledge of the not-for-profit world from their active leadership roles serving on a broad range of not-for-profit boards.

Our Not-For-Profit Practice Team has worked with, and provided successful representation to, hundreds of not-for-profits.

Representative experience:

• Advised on the affiliation of two not-for-profit hospital systems.
• Counseled on the restructuring of a scientific research organization.
• Represented a college on tax-exempt bond financing.
• Advised a hospital system on the acquisition and construction of its new administrative headquarters.

We also counsel numerous organizations on revisions to their governing documents to comply with recent changes in New York’s Not-for-Profit Corporation Law.

Members of the Phillips Lytle Not-For-Profit Practice Team provide board training on governance and other issues facing not-for-profits. In collaboration with a NYS Charities Bureau official, team members presented a program on governance and recent changes in New York law to nearly 200 board members in Western New York. In addition, our attorneys regularly speak about governance and tax matters of interest to not-for-profit organizations and industry associations throughout the community.