Bob is your point of first contact for legal help in a wide range of practice areas including personal injury, critical incident response, nonprofit governance, sexual harassment employment, and intellectual property matters.

Called to serve their faith and guided by spiritual laws, the leaders and business administrators of religious institutions face unique challenges as they try to integrate their faith with the law.

Our Church & Ministry Law practice group is particularly attuned to the challenges facing ministries as they attempt to negotiate legal issues inherent in commerce. Operated by volunteers and staff who may have little business training, religious institutions are often confronted with complex IRS rules and regulations, land-use restrictions, employment law questions, leases, commercial contracts and a host of other issues inherent in operating a large organization.

Our employment law attorneys bring important insights to process of hiring, supervising and, when necessary, terminating employees of our ministry clients. We frequently assist ministries in drafting and updating Employee Handbooks with special sensitivity to the ministerial nature of the job descriptions in a religious organization. The attorneys and staff in our practice group are themselves people of faith concerned about caring for the disadvantaged and broken. We view our work in the law as a part of our personal ministry. Our attorneys have been instrumental in creating and assisting organizations to:

  • Forming, amending, merging, consolidating and terminating charitable organizations
  • Creating and updating organizational documents such as articles, bylaws, and operating agreements
  • Organizing congregation and board meetings and preparing minutes
  • Board governance training
  • Developing best practices for the life cycle of board members, employees and volunteers as required by the Internal Revenue Service and Form 990
  • Creating facilities use policies and procedures
  • Developing workable practice and procedure manuals
  • Designing and implementing multi-site legal structures for growing ministries
  • Qualifying Arizona churches to receive Arizona Tax Credit funds
  • Donor advisory services, planned giving programs and estate planning
  • Employment Law
  • Land use, zoning, entitlement and Religious Land Use & Institutionalized Persons Act matters
  • Issues facing faith-based schools
  • Protecting your campus against hostile claims using Campus Preservation Planning
  • Reviewing contracts from vendors involved in campus expansion projects
  • Long-term ground leases
  • Policies, procedures, leases and contracts for christian schools
  • Armed/unarmed Campus
  • Security Policies