Firm News

Wiggin and Dana attorneys donate more than $1 million in services in first year of program aimed to support minority-owned small businesses

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (July 2021) – Wiggin and Dana is proud to announce that the law firm has met the first year goal of its Wiggin Opportunity Initiative (WOI), a decade-long commitment to provide free legal services to fuel the success of minority-owned businesses. Since the program’s launch in July 2020, Wiggin attorneys have supported more than 100 minority-owned businesses and provided over $1 million in legal services, keeping the firm on track to meet its 10-year pledge.

“This year has demonstrated the deep commitment of our attorneys to the issues underlying the initiative,” said Paul Hughes, Wiggin and Dana’s Managing Partner. “I am proud of their work and our dedication to this project. At a ground-level, we are happy to help the founders and business owners who are our neighbors, and, more broadly, we believe this work helps to drive equity in our society and long-lasting success for minority founders and business owners.”

Wiggin and Dana offers a variety of legal services to WOI clients to address common business issues in the areas of employment, real estate, intellectual property, privacy, commercial arrangements, corporate governance, financing, and disputes.

“When we learned about the Wiggin Opportunity Initiative, we knew our community could benefit from this counsel,” said CT NAACP‘s President Scot Esdaile. “We look forward to many more years of a strategic partnership in strengthening our One Million Jobs Campaign for the Formerly Incarcerated. This support has helped us to connect individuals who are in dire need of a second chance with jobs.”

Other strategic partners for WOI include Women’s Business Development Council and Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale University. 

WOI client Courtroom5, founded by former college professors, Dr. Sonja Ebron and Dr. Debra Slone, is a start-up that provides pro se litigants with tools to more effectively represent themselves in civil cases. Wiggin and Dana attorneys helped Courtroom5 to draft contact templates, terms of service, and privacy policies for its various services, helping them manage their capital structure, and assisting them in resolving a thorny dispute with a key vendor.

“Wiggin and Dana has been a gift for us at Courtroom5,” said Ebron, the company’s Chief Executive Officer. “They are a rare combination of trusted, authentic and available. They’ve become a go-to resource for legal matters we can’t afford to get wrong.”

Unsiloed, founded by Love Odih Kumuyi, is another WOI client. It is a leading, independent consulting and advisory enterprise based in New York. Unsiloed’s collective of diversity, equity & inclusion practitioners engage globally with organizations in many sectors. The Unsiloed Method is grounded in transformative dialogue principles and founded on the core belief that solutions are more inclusive, sustainable and equitable when stakeholders are clear about the problems they seek to solve; aware of the diverse needs and interests of others, and decision making is participatory.  As Unsiloed experienced rapid growth, Wiggin and Dana stepped in to provide assistance with reviewing business contracts, which included privacy policies, and drafting agreements for the increased hiring of consultants that was needed in order to keep up with the growth of the business. 

“Wiggin and Dana became my business ally,” said Love Odih Kumuyi, Founder and Culture Engineer Officer.  “I felt I had someone who was looking after my best interest during a time when I really needed the support. In addition to the many ways I’ve seen companies get creative about equity and economic justice for minority-owned businesses, the WOI program provided real tangible services that truly benefited me, my team, and growing organization.”

As WOI enters its second year, Wiggin and Dana continues to look for strategic partners and more businesses to help through the program.

“We will continue WOI with our original mission in mind,” said Mark Kaduboski, Wiggin and Dana partner. “WOI was created in response to the social justice movement of 2020, but we have built an actionable program that will be sustainable over the next decade. We look forward to continuing to help small business owners and entrepreneurs with this program.”

To learn more about becoming a strategic partner or if you are a minority-owned business in need of legal services and cannot afford them, contact John Doroghazi at jdoroghazi@wiggin.com.

Wiggin and Dana is a full-service law firm with more than 150 attorneys in Connecticut, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC and Florida. Consistently recognized by Chambers USA, IFLR, Benchmark Litigation and others, Wiggin and Dana attorneys deliver high-quality, efficient and cost-effective legal services to a diverse client base, including Fortune 50 & 100 finance, insurance, defense, aerospace and life sciences companies, hospitals, universities, charitable organizations and high-net-worth individuals. For more information about the firm, visit www.wiggin.com.