Page 17 - BusinessWest March 17, 2025

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Beyond the Courtroom
Tanzi Cannon Aims to Cultivate Better Workplaces
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
[email protected]
Tanzi Cannon knows litigation. And she enjoys litigation.
But there’s something she found she likes even more, which is why she built a law prac- tice around it.
Backing up a bit, in her previous role, Cannon was the chief litigation officer at the Royal Law Firm. “We were obviously heavy on litigation, but we also did a lot of advice and counsel,” she recalled. “Litigation is strategic, and there’s competition, and every case is different, and I’m
a certified investigator, so I got to use those investigation skills.
“But I found that the enjoyable part was actually when the litigation was over and I could go back to the business and say, OK, ‘here are the things that could have prevented litigation for you. Here are some things that we can do to improve this department.’ I’m a business person, so I also had some business advice,” she added.
Unfortunately, once litigation was over, clients were typically tired of talking about legal matters — and tired of spending money on them. “Consequently, those preventive conversations were the short conversations, and I really wanted those to be the long conversations.”
“ I found that the enjoyable part was actually when the litigation was over and I could go back to the business and say, OK, ‘here are the things that could have prevented litigation for you.’”
That’s why she decided to leave Royal and launch her own firm, General Counsel by Cannon, which specializes in business law for small businesses — focusing not on litigation, though she will handle that if need be, but on the nuts and bolts of helping businesses avoid the courtroom and create healthier, safer, more successful companies.
“When I left the firm, it was to start this model of busi- ness advice and counsel — that’s why it’s General Counsel by Cannon, a fractional general-counsel law firm,” Cannon told BusinessWest. “I felt like I wanted to not only do liti- gation, but to focus on prevention, and also be able to add some of that business advice in there as well.”
Many clients, she explained, have business contracts that need be renegotiated, reviewed, or drafted anew,
or need assistance with human-resources law. She also assists with organizational development, succession plan- ning, change management, and writing a company’s stan-
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