Joe Bill Whittenburg

Joe Bill facilitates and enhances cross-functional and multi-disciplinary collaboration through his ability to speak fluently with people of diverse disciplines and perform high-level work in word documents, spreadsheets and presentation slides. He is results-oriented and pragmatic in his pursuit of team objectives. Joe Bill participates effectively as a leader or any other level of team member, and he is able to discern what each situation demands of him. Joe Bill is willing to challenge the status quo in the interest of greater team performance, and he proactively engages in acts of service to bolster team cohesion. He drives work to completion and thoughtfully transitions recurring tasks to more optimal resources than himself. 

Joe Bill has extensive experience working on mergers, acquisitions and divestitures, incentive plans and public company filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forms he has filed with the SEC on behalf of clients include proxy statements, compensation- related 8-Ks, changes in beneficial ownership of Section 16 filers and SD Conflict Minerals. He also drafts and negotiates commercial agreements, forms legal entities, assists with capital formation and maintains records of subsidiaries, in a corporate secretarial role. Joe Bill participates in internal controls related to the reporting of outstanding stock-based awards and shares available for grant as well as compliance with stock ownership guidelines. He negotiates and drafts documentation related to commercial real estate acquisitions, divestitures and leases. 

Joe Bill works closely, and in depth, with companies in every phase of the business lifecycle including startup, growth and expansion, shake-out and maturity. Though not a bankruptcy lawyer, Joe Bill assists companies going through bankruptcy to restructure debt or liquidate. Joe Bill also assists clients with business divorces or dissolving partnerships. He has been fortunate, so far, to participate in resolutions that did not resort to litigation. Joe Bill assists companies under public, private equity, family, and individual ownership. He supports entrepreneurs as well as institutional management teams. 

As a Network Lawyer, Joe Bill provides legal counsel to a variety of clients through his law firm, Jos. W. Whittenburg, P.C. He works through in-house secondments to provide temporary or interim services on a monthly fee arrangement. Joe Bill undertakes some transactional work on a fixed-fee arrangement. He also works by the hour. In short, Joe Bill strives to provide the fee structure that best suits the needs of his clients. He draws on extensive personal and professional relationships to build efficient and effective teams of lawyers around particular needs and, where desired, provide a single point of contact with consolidated invoicing.

 As a Solution Provider, Joe Bill combines his ability to derive variables and mathematical operators from legal documents to perform complex calculations. By doing so, he helps companies satisfy their compliance, reporting, financial modeling and document drafting needs. He serves as a translator between Legal Departments, on one hand, and Finance and Accounting Departments or Information Technology Departments, on the other hand. Joe Bill organizes, leads and otherwise assists due diligence efforts related to the preparation and negotiation of material contracts and corporate transactions. He uses cloud-based SaaS applications such as Workiva WDesk and DFIN ActiveDisclosure SM to turn proxy statements into reporting engines based on two principals:  from year-to-year, formulas rather than numbers are corrected or refined; and (ii) data goes into the workbook in one place only and proliferates via references, links and formulas. By doing so, Joe Bill helps lawyers bypass the work of calculating numbers and begin, immediately, to scrutinize them.

 He improves work flows to save time and generate better product. For example, he prepares the first draft of next years proxy as a final check of the current years proxy before it is filed. Joe Bill creates a one-directional flow of data between the stock ownership guidelines workbook, proxy workbook, stock incentive plan reporting workbook and annual director and officer questionnaires. Modern legal departments, whether they realize it or not, are in the data business, and Joe Bill is passionate about getting people out of broken processes so computers can do what computers do best (i.e., process data) and people can do what people do best (i.e., think). He draws on extensive personal and professional relationships to build efficient and effective teams of professionals around particular needs and, where desired, provide a single point of contact with consolidated invoicing. 

In this new business environment, Joe Bill typically, upon engagement, receives an email address and network login credentials from each client. This allows him to collaborate on the same network and videoconferencing platform as client personnel. Jo Bill works remotely or in the office to suit client preferences. While based in Houston, he enjoys the flexibility to work anywhere, and he would appreciate the opportunity to make your problems his own. Workiva is a registered trademark of Workiva Inc. (“Workiva”). ActiveDiscloser is a service mark of Donnelley Financial LLC (“DFIN”). Joe Bill is a proponent these SaaS applications, but he has no official capacity with, or authority to represent, Workiva or DFIN. Neither Workiva nor DFIN endorse Joe Bill’s work.