Beverage Industry Group
We handle regulatory and other special legal requirements for hospitality and beverage industry members, from planning through execution of transactions and operations. Our expertise includes making, importing, marketing, promoting, advertising, and selling licensed beverages, and protecting beverage packaging and other intellectual property.
We know your industry. Our team delivers creative and uniquely experienced advice and representation to local, regional, national, and international beverage, restaurant, and hospitality companies. We know not only the laws applicable to wine, beer, and spirits, but also the “on the street” reality of our clients’ businesses.
Experienced guides
We guide clients through the regulatory maze of forming, acquiring and financing licensed beverage businesses and properties and assure that complex transactions are not delayed or derailed by the little-known technicalities of “tied house” and other special laws. We have:
- Obtained prompt and reliable administrative approvals of national and international merger and acquisitions involving simultaneous closings of dozens of licensed locations.
- Drafted and helped secure passage of amendments to state laws to eliminate obstacles to client transactions.
- and prosecuted complex license and permit applications for manufacturing, importing, wholesaling, and retailing tier businesses.
Protecting your interests
Licensed beverage businesses face unique challenges. We help you meet them in all areas of your business, including:
- Supplier changes in distribution. In dealing with distributors, brand owners face unique state laws that upset expectations based on normal contract law in a majority of states. We offer unparalleled depth of analysis of distribution issues for wine, beer, and spirits.
- Conflicts between liquor laws and antitrust laws. We can coordinate your compliance programs to accommodate the often confusing interplay of liquor regulations and trade regulation laws, and when necessary can resolve conflicts by administrative or judicial action.
- Protection of labels and packages from knock-offs. We can identify your packaging elements that need protecting, overcome recurring problems in registration of licensed beverage brand names as trademarks, and aggressively defend the commercial advantages that flow from distinctive brand names and packages.
- Administrative clearance of innovative advertising, promotion, and pricing. Licensed beverage regulation is inherently conservative. We like clients who want to break the mold in their marketing and we have our hammers ready.
Averting and resolving disputes
We work closely with our licensed beverage clients to avert problems and resolve disputes promptly and cost-effectively before administrative agencies and in state and federal courts. We have litigated, arbitrated, and mediated licensed beverage issues of all degrees of complexity and when necessary challenged the validity of laws and drafted corrective legislation.
Business systems
We help develop and establish systems and materials for our clients that:
- Enable them to manage their licenses and then regulate operations efficiently and without unnecessary interference by regulatory agencies.
- Significantly reduce the cost of changes in distribution structures.
Key relationships
We negotiate and document relationships between clients and their business partners, customers and suppliers, including: distribution agreements, marketing services agreements, promotional co-op agreements, joint ventures with competitors, and employment agreements involving licensed activities.
Group Leader: Susan M. Johnson
Team Members: Robert C. Cumbow, Shin Hoshikawa, Stephanie J. Meier, Mark N. Ludwig
