Non-profit Attorneys Helping Charities Thrive with Legal Clarity and Compliance
Our non-profit attorneys support charities, foundations, and educational institutions with formation, tax exemption, and operational compliance. At Kirton McConkie, our non-profit attorneys in Utah help 501(c)(3) organizations with formation, governance, compliance, and tax-exempt status.
Whether you’re starting a grassroots nonprofit or running a multibillion-dollar foundation, our attorneys are experienced at helping nonprofits navigate the wide range of legal issues affecting their operations. We pair experienced lawyers with nonprofit-specific issues, such as tax-exempt status, nonprofit governance, donor restrictions on fund use, and charitable solicitation with lawyers in other practice areas who are used to applying their expertise to the unique fact patterns and goals of non-profit institutions. Our clients include private foundations, religious and educational institutions, healthcare organizations, trade associations, advocacy groups, and donor-advised funds with operations across the U.S. and around the world.
Our team brings firsthand insight from non-profit board service, offering practical guidance on fiduciary duties, grantmaking, and governance.
Non-profit legal services include:
- Consulting and assisting clients with the full array of tax issues surrounding tax-exempt status, unrelated business tax, and the various special taxes on exempt organization compensation, private foundations, and donor-advised funds. We can help with entity formation and initial exemption, ongoing compliance, and major transactions and restructurings.
- Preparing organizational documents, including articles of incorporation, bylaws, policies, trusts, and resolving board and committee governance and conflict-of-interest rules.
- Negotiating major and minor contracts, acquisitions, mergers, subsidiary formation, and similar corporate transactions.
- Counseling donors and charities on gifts of complex assets, including gifts of business interests in advance of a potential liquidation event.
- Employment advice, including advice on specific exemptions to wage laws for charitable volunteers and the scope of religious exemptions to generally applicable employment laws, and (in conjunction with local counsel) advice on when services arrangements could give rise to employment obligations in various countries abroad.
- Leasing, acquiring, disposing of, and developing real estate, and obtaining appropriate permits and exemptions under local land use and property tax regulations.
- Managing international activities to minimize legal risk, including working with our network of local counsel on local-law employment, non-profit, and foreign funding rules. We can help customize our clients’ foreign presence, from collaboration agreements with local institutions to establishing branches or local non-profit subsidiaries.
- Helping healthcare organizations with their unique regulatory requirements, including health privacy and anti-kickback rules and the community benefit requirements of section 501(r).
- Immigration and tax advice on moving employees from the United States abroad and vice versa.
- Intellectual property advice, including protection of trademarks and copyrights and unrelated-business sensitive structuring of licensing, distribution, and broadcasting arrangements.
- Designing context-appropriate risk-adjusted anti-terrorism, anti-money-laundering, and sanctions-compliance programs for grants and service provider relationships abroad and applying for specific licenses for otherwise prohibited activity in sanctioned countries.
- Litigation and risk management advice ranging from routine issues about the use of donated funds, employment disputes, and tort liability for harms to a nonprofit’s beneficiaries or volunteers, to constitutional free-speech and religious-freedom claims for exceptions to generally applicable rules and regulations.
- Approaching legislative or executive branch policymakers about potential legislation or regulations and their impact on non-profit clients.
From formation to fundraising, and governance to global operations, we help non-profit organizations stay compliant, mission-focused, and built for long-term impact.