Joel J.H. Funk

Joel J.H. Funk is Managing Partner of Hart David Carson LLP and head of its mergers-and-acquisitions practice. He co-founded the firm with Jonathan D. Herpy, Sr. in June 2013 in Downers Grove, Illinois. It opened as Hart David LLP, took the Carson name in 2017, and now numbers 63 attorneys, with its principal office at One East Erie Street, Chicago. Joel acts for companies and for the people who build them, from the founder with a start-up to the owner with a buyer at the door. The firm calls its work two chairs at one table, the company's chair for the business and the family's for the wealth it produces, and treats the two as one relationship. Joel practices in both.

The company's chair

The deal work runs buy-side and sell-side across many industries, and Joel stays with it from diligence through structuring to the post-closing work that decides whether the deal was worth doing. In 2021 he led the firm's representation of Addicting Games in its $35 million sale to publicly traded Enthusiast Gaming Holdings Inc., paid in cash, stock and debt. Between acquisitions he builds what makes a company worth acquiring: the reorganization done before a buyer's counsel asks for one, the joint venture that lets two companies work together without one buying the other, and the governance that goes on whether or not a deal is in view, for non-profits as much as for companies.

The family's chair

Joel's private-client work starts where families usually do, with wills, revocable trusts and powers of attorney, and extends to large estates and to assets the standard forms never anticipated, cryptocurrency for one. Where estate tax is the exposure, he builds irrevocable structures such as charitable remainder trusts and spousal lifetime access trusts that manage it and carry what a family has built to the next generation; asset protection is part of the same brief. A founder who has just sold a company has a different balance sheet from the one the estate plan assumed, and the question of what the proceeds are for arrives with the wire. With Joel in both chairs, the business only has to be explained once.

Running the firm

Joel organized the firm's 2013 launch, has been its managing partner since 2014, and in the early years managed its first international relationships. Training in business administration, paired with practical experience in corporate law and entrepreneurial investment, gives him a grounded read on the administrative, organizational and contractual questions that land on a client's desk, and on those that land on his. He runs Hart David Carson on the terms it offers clients: one partner answers for the whole matter, and the client has that partner's direct line. The rule is easy to state and, at 63 attorneys, work to keep. Keeping it is what a managing partner is for.

A sale closes on a Friday. The family behind it is still a client on Monday, and the partner who answers is the same one.