Legal Tools for Entrepreneurs

     Recently the Small Business Administration selected lawyer Nina Kaufman  as its Women in Business Champion of the Year, for the region including NY and New Jersey. For over 20 years Nina has created a unique niche for herself both as a legal advisor to and advocate of women’s businesses. She identifies her professional mission as “demystifying legal mumbo jumbo” for small entrepreneurs so they won’t be intimidated.  A client describes Nina’s mission simply as “preventing small companies from crashing and burning.” 

     With an M.A. from the London School of Economics and a law degree from Boston University, Nina has practiced law for about twenty years but admits her first unsuccessful foray was with a partner who left her holding a significant amount of debt.  “I still have war wounds,” she admits, “but I now view them as a badge of honor, because I have learned to move forward on my own.”

     Because as a sole practitioner, she is limited by the number of hours in her work day, Nina has borrowed a page from the entrepreneurs she counsels.

Last Call for Winning Women!

June 30th is the deadline for the Ernst &Young Winning Women Competition, a  national competition and leadership program designed for women entrepreneurs to accelerate the growth of their businesses.This program is designed to help women entrepreneurs scale their companies by providing them with one-to-one business advice and "insider access" to Ernst & Young's unparalleled networks of established entrepreneurs, high-growth company CEOs, investors and advisors. This includes participation at the Ernst & Young Strategic Growth Forum® 2011, the country’s most prestigious gathering of high-growth companies, November 9-13 in Palm Springs, CA (www.ey.com/us/strategicgrowthforum)

Applicants are women CEOs who have founded their companies within the past 10 years and have reported at least $1 million in revenue during each of the past two. Typical applicant company revenue ranges from $1 million up to approximately $20 million annually. To learn more, how to apply or how to nominate another deserving woman entrepreneur, visit www.ey.com/us/entrepreneurialwinningwomen

GIrl Tech Inventors and Mentors

Hail NYC Team        credit  C Colon

  One night in May the premises of AOL  in downtown  NYC  vibrated  with the chatty energy and nerves  of 47 teen age girls from 17 local high schools  getting ready to pitch their  newly created apps to a group of four  judges from the worlds of both technology and venture capital. The Technovation Challenge pitch night, the first on the East Coast, was the culmination of a three month program, matching high school girls with high tech mentors from local industry and universities to create mobile phone app prototypes using Google’s App Inventor for Android. The teams met weekly for three hour sessions at Google’s New York offices.   Early support for the program came from the US Office of Naval Research seeking solutions to a crisis in recruiting sufficient tech savvy professionals.