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| ¡¡¡¡Experience |
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The Firm¡¯s founder and principal is John Paul Huntington Vigman.
Graduated from NYU School of Law in 1989 and admitted to practice
in both Connecticut and New York in 1990, Mr. Vigman has over
17 years of legal practice and business experience; he has
managed the legal aspects of domestic and international business
transactions for his clients, big and small. In that time,
he has handled not only legal matters in over a dozen US states
but also more than 30 countries. Mr. Vigman has represented
domestic and international entities and individuals in their
activities locally as well as abroad. During his decade long
experience as regional general counsel for publicly traded
companies, Mr. Vigman learned first hand the different needs
and challenges of the cross-border business. This overseas
experience complements his many years of experience in New
York, whereby he also understands the needs and challenges
of the domestic and foreign client here in New York and elsewhere
in the US.
Mr. Vigman has represented Fortune 500 companies, internationally recognized banks and financial institutions as well as smaller privately held companies. He has structured, drafted, negotiated and unwound over a dozen joint ventures in sectors as diverse as traditional manufacturing and product distribution to hotel ownership and real estate development. In the last 11 years of practice, he has led negotiations in excess of over 45 acquisitions and divestitures (including tender-offer, share, asset, bids in bankruptcy). He has broad commercial drafting and negotiating experience including, among others: procurement, distribution, project sales, construction, licensing, management, service and consulting agreements, bespoken IT implementation software, supply chain management contracts, technical assistance and technology transfer agreements, and B2B/B2C related e-commerce documents. On a daily basis, he advised people as diverse as the CEO and CFO of publicly traded companies, sales and procurement people, engineers, product developers, factory managers and hospitality general managers.
Mr. Vigman began his career at White & Case in their New York
office, where he provided finance and corporate counsel to
many premier US, Japanese and European financial and banking
institutions. Later, he moved to the New York office of King & Spalding
where he continued to provide legal services to large financial
institutions but also provided legal advice to many smaller
investors in joint ventures, real estate developments projects
such as hotels and town home complexes. He then served as regional
general counsel for the then New York Stock Exchange publicly
traded Renaissance Hotels International (owner of Renaissance® and
Ramada®) for their legal operations in Europe, Middle East
and Africa, focusing primarily on hotel development, joint
ventures, acquisitions and financing as well as managing litigation
and hotel operations. After the Marriott¡¯s takeover of Renaissance
Hotels, Mr. Vigman moved to Hunter Douglas as general counsel
for their legal operations in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Hunter Douglas is a publicly traded manufacturing company,
active in +80 countries in window coverings and architectural
products with sales revenue of US$3 billion. After seven years
serving the legal needs of Hunter Douglas, Mr. Vigman moved
to Shandong Province in China where he combined his passion
for Asian languages with the creation of a firm providing legal
drafting services in English for non-international European
law firms on commercial and transactional matters and assisting
small European companies with purchasing from, and outsourcing
production in, Shandong province, China.
In addition to his
native English, Mr. Vigman is fluent in Dutch, French and German
and has over a decade of experience of negotiating and drafting
in those languages. He is nearly fluent in spoken Japanese
and highly proficient in spoken Mandarin.
Mr. Vigman obtained his Juris Doctorate from NYU (New York
University) School of Law and his Bachelor Arts degree from
Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He also received
a certification degree for advanced Japanese language studies
from Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan and a graduation certificate
of two years successful study of Mandarin Chinese at Yantai
University in Shandong, China. He has received two fellowships
from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst DAAD, the German
government¡¯s equivalent to the US Fulbright Scholar program,
to study German post-war politics in Freie Universität Berlin
and later German law at Tübingen Universität in combination
with a clerkship (Referendar) at the Court of Appeals of the
State of Nordrhein Westfalen in Dusseldorf, Germany. |
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