Nick Wenker will be speaking in the Performance Track.
Negotiating Like a Boss: Contract Tricks and Traps for Business Leaders
Even business leaders at the highest levels routinely cause huge legal or financial challenges for their companies by entering into contracts they didn’t properly negotiate. Too often business leaders only look at pricing and other items they are familiar with, giving away huge value or generating catastrophic problems when something unexpected happens before the contract expires. I have seen negotiation failures or other contract mistakes from business leaders blow entire annual department budgets or even spark leadership turnover in the C-suite. Even a short presentation from an experienced business contract attorney can help business leaders avoid common and potentially very costly mistakes. My presentation will help business leaders look at contracts, and the relationships they represent, in a new light by sharing practical tips, war stories from my own experiences, and easy-to-follow explanations that ditch the legalese.
Audience members will learn:
- Which legal items to fight for and which to trade away;
- The biggest contractual traps;
- Aspects that could go wrong under the contract and with leverage if the relationship sours;
- Exit strategies and conditions;
- How to balance fighting for legal rights with preserving the business relationship.
Nick Wenker
Deputy General Counsel and SVP of Legal @ Young Living Essential Oils
Nick Wenker is Deputy General Counsel and SVP of Legal at Young Living Essential Oils (YL), a multi-billion-dollar global consumer goods company based out of Lehi, Utah. He is the primary attorney responsible for a wide variety of YL’s legal workstreams including domestic contracts and other transactional matters, legal disputes such as litigation, mediations, and arbitrations, environmental and water law, CBD and hemp law, non-profit law, branding and product launch strategy issues, and more. He also previously worked as a Vice President in YL’s Operations department running a global business division of over 150 personnel across YL’s farms, sourcing, global security, and safety teams.
During his more than seven years at the company Nick has reviewed and negotiated contracts large and small for almost every department within YL. He has seen good agreements and bad agreements ranging from logging contracts to software purchases to mergers and acquisitions to sourcing contracts to warehousing arrangements and much more. Nick also has extensive experience in the difficult art of re-negotiating and revising agreements that were already previously signed, under the specter of potential litigation or damaged business relations between the parties.
Prior to joining YL Nick worked as a transactional corporate attorney at the Houston office of Kirkland and Ellis, a major global law firm. He also previously worked in various political and legislative roles including working for a US Senator, a US House Majority Leader, a Texas Supreme Court Justice, a member of the German Federal Parliament, and a member of the Bavarian Parliament. Nick has a B.A. in German and Humanities as well as a J.D. (law degree) from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. in Political Science from U.N.C.-Chapel Hill, and an M.B.A. from the University of Utah. Nick and his family originally immigrated to Houston, Texas from Zurich, Switzerland in 1993.
