NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS

Meeting the intricate legal challenges encountered by today’s nonprofit institutions requires crossing into many areas of the law. Nonprofit institutions benefit from attorneys who are not only focused on understanding their business needs, but who can also provide creative solutions to help achieve their strategic missions. It is critical for these institutions to work with someone who brings knowledge, understanding, and sensitivity to all matters.

For over a century, Nixon Peabody’s Nonprofit practice has provided comprehensive legal services to more than 150 tax-exempt organizations. Our attorneys are committed to meeting the diverse and complex needs of this industry segment, and provide integrated solutions for all our clients’ legal needs—from highly specialized issues to day-to-day operational concerns.

Our Nonprofit practice serves a full range of educational, health care, foundation, arts, religious, trade association, and other nonprofit entities in the United States and abroad. The broad array of services within the firm, and the eagerness of our people to serve the tax-exempt community, results in a formidable range of services available to the sector. There is hardly a need of these institutions that we cannot serve. At the same time, we understand the various markets and constituencies served by these institutions, and their important role in the local, and in some cases international, community.

Our team offers unparalleled experience in exempt organization governance and structure, tax-exempt status/UBIT matters, local exemptions, charitable and planned giving matters, state charitable solicitation laws, investments (UPMIFA), grantmaking, lobbying activities, tax planning and disputes, corporate reorganizations, and other activities. We advise on both traditional matters and emerging challenges, and help to ensure that governing boards and administrators fully understand their rights and choices, even when the issues are new. As a full-service law firm, we offer our nonprofit clients access to the complete range of skills and experience available at the firm.

Nixon Peabody’s Nonprofit/Charities Law practice was recognized in the “Best Law Firms” rankings by U.S. News & World Report/Best Lawyers (2011–2012), earning metropolitan honors in Rochester.

Representative experience

• Aided the Franklin Pierce Law Center, New Hampshire’s only independent law school, in its merger with the University of New Hampshire, which will serve as a national model for others to follow as this trend evolves.
• Assisted five universities in a collaborative super-computing center, using innovative financing through new markets tax credits.
• Successfully represented The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in the historic SFMOMA-Fisher Agreement. Nixon Peabody attorneys served as counsel and advisors to the parties to craft the unprecedented agreement to showcase the renowned 1,100 piece Fisher Collection of modern and contemporary artwork.
• Provide counsel to the Queen of Sweden, helping Her Majesty to expand the reach of her multi-national world’s children foundation here in the United States and abroad.
• Particular depth in matters involving charitable assets, their use and investment. Our attorneys are familiar with the nexus among the institutional advancement, investment, and finance functions with charitable institutions, large and small, having represented institutions coast-to-coast on these matters.
• Nixon Peabody LLP acts as counsel to numerous community foundations in the Northeast, successfully counseling on the adoption of the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act in Massachusetts, and then helping New York charitable institutions navigate the challenges of that state’s recently adopted statutes.
• We have worked with several major university endowments from coast-to-coast on the restructuring of their relationships since the market downturn, successfully combining our depth of experience in charitable fund management and investment counseling.