3/3/2010
Two Warner Norcross & Judd partners -- Mark Harder and Mark Spitzley – are featured in the Legal Quarterly section of the March 1, 2010 edition of the Grand Rapids Business Journal.
Harder, who has been with the law firm since 1990, played a key role in writing the new Michigan Trust Code, which was signed into law by Gov. Jennifer Granholm last summer and takes effect April 1.
"We had some statutes, some cases, and we had a lot of unknowns," Harder told the Business Journal of the work he began in 2003. "We thought we knew how courts would decide things if they were faced with them, but generally there were a lot of areas where we simply didn't know what the rules were."
Harder is a partner in the law firm's Holland office. In addition to trusts and estates law, he focuses his practice on family businesses and succession planning.
In a separate article, Spitzley, a lawyer with Warner since 1999, discusses the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and encourages companies that do business overseas to be very careful.
The FCPA prohibits U.S. companies from bribing foreign officials to obtain or retain business. The FBI arrested 22 people in January for violating the FCPA, which triggered Spitzley's warning.
Bribes and under-the-table payments are an accepted part of doing business in some countries, according to the article. Spitzley, who specializes in international business issues, encourages his clients to know specifically who they are dealing with and to create no-bribery policies and compliance plans.