Practical expertise for growing and distressed companies: the judgment of a chief legal officer, the understanding of a chief human resources officer, and the experience of an operator who has sat in all three seats.
Correll Executive Counsel exists for a simple reason: whether you are rolling up acquisitions, turning around the business, or making the hard changes necessary to succeed, the intersection of operations, legal, and people requires one set of hands, not three advisors passing the problem between them. Addressing all three challenges at once is not a convenience. It is how the work actually gets done right. Correll Executive Counsel provides all three through a single engagement.
Representative Results
$22M
EBITDA swing, negative to positive, across a nine-company platform in just over thirty months.
1,000+
Involuntary workforce reductions executed, including a WARN event, without a single litigated claim.
$1B
Manufacturer supported as Chief Legal Officer and Chief Human Resources Officer across six facilities in five states.
$3M
Recovered through affirmative litigation against coverage denials, supplier breaches, and customer payment failures.
Figures reflect specific engagements and the results achieved in them. Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any other matter.
Legal Services
Most companies reach a point where outside counsel is answering questions too late, at too high a cost, and with too little understanding of the business. A fractional CLO engages the business consistently from week to week, sees the decisions forming, and prices the risk before it is already priced for you — typically for far less than outside counsel.
Legal advice that ignores the P&L is not good advice. Every recommendation accounts for three things at once: what it does to profitability, what it does to the company's value in a sale or a financing, and whether it holds up under external scrutiny. Balancing those three factors requires experience carrying operating responsibility while supporting a business's legal and human resources functions, not just having read about it.
Exit value is driven by entity structure, board and member governance, equity matters, and the documentation a buyer or lender will eventually ask to see. Meanwhile, diligence problems are cheap to prevent and expensive to explain. Embedded, operational legal leadership ensures the business is ready when the time for a liquidity event finally comes.
Managing a workforce — especially when combining companies, addressing distress, and exiting — is one of the hardest challenges facing any management team. Separations, restrictive covenants, internal investigations, reductions in force, and personnel decisions all carry legal and valuation consequences. Infusing legal guidance into workforce leadership goes beyond mitigating risk to create meaningful additional value. These are legal engagements, with privilege attached.
Legal spend is one of the few line items that grows without anyone deciding it should. Selecting outside counsel, scoping the work, pricing it, and holding firms to the budget converts an unpredictable expense into a managed one. A decade spent building those bills from the other side makes controlling them a margin exercise rather than a guessing game.
Contracts are where revenue quality is actually determined. Customer and vendor agreements, MSAs, licensing, and the negotiations behind them set margin, allocate risk, and become the first thing a buyer's counsel reads in diligence. Terms the business can operate under, rather than terms it has to work around, show up later as both cleaner operations and a cleaner data room.
Roll-ups fail in integration far more often than they fail in negotiation. Buy-side and sell-side support on acquisitions, membership interest purchases, and mergers — including private equity due diligence, executive contract analysis, and integration planning — treats the close as the beginning of the work rather than the end of it. That distinction is the difference between owning a platform and owning a portfolio.
Business Advisory — Not Legal Services
Some of what a company needs is not a legal question. Correll Executive Counsel offers additional business consulting engagements beyond traditional legal services to meet this need.
People are usually one of the largest costs in a business and the least deliberately managed. Organizational design, compensation structure, performance management, and the systems underneath them determine whether headcount compounds value or simply compounds expense. Building those systems creates an accretive, thriving workforce culture rather than a function run off the side of someone's desk.
Some decisions have no clean owner, and those decisions tend to be the ones that determine whether a company makes it through a transition, a sale, or other challenges. Succession, partner disputes, transaction readiness, and the moments where the right answer is a business answer rather than a technical one all land in that category. Working through them alongside someone who has sat in the operating seat turns a stalled decision into a made one.
An important distinction. Fractional CHRO and executive advisory engagements are business consulting services. They are not the practice of law, they do not create an attorney-client relationship, and the protections that attach to legal representation — including the attorney-client privilege — do not apply to them. Where a matter requires legal advice, we say so and engage it separately as legal work.
The Practice
Mike Correll has spent the last five years as an operator delivering practical, business-rational legal and human resources leadership. As a CLO and CHRO overseeing a nine-company roll-up, he helped drive his organization from near-liquidation and negative EBITDA to a single unified brand forecasting a $22 million swing from negative to positive EBITDA in just over thirty months. In the same roles at another company, Mike oversaw a twenty-one person human resources organization alongside the legal function for a $1 billion manufacturer with 1,600 employees across six facilities.
Mike's in-house success stemmed from extensive, sophisticated private practice. Over more than a decade in private practice at multiple AmLaw firms practicing labor and employment, commercial litigation, and appellate law, he made partner in labor and employment at Reed Smith, LLP.
Contact
A short description of the company and the issue is enough to start. Please do not send confidential or time-sensitive information before we have agreed to an engagement in writing. Contacting the firm does not create an attorney-client relationship.