Spadea Lignana LLC

Focus and practice areas

Spadea Lignana works on one side of the franchise relationship: the franchisor's. The firm's service list covers franchising a business, Franchise Disclosure Documents, state registrations, trademarks, international franchising, compliance systems for franchisors and franchisor due diligence.

Those are the tasks a brand faces when it decides to sell franchises. Drafting an FDD is document work with regulatory deadlines attached. State registration means filing in the states that require it, then keeping those filings current as the disclosure document changes each year.

The firm also handles the purchase and sale of existing franchise businesses. Its contact form includes an option for franchise disputes, so litigation over franchise agreements falls within what it takes on.

Trademarks as part of the franchise work

Trademarks sit on the firm's home page as a named service. In a franchise system the mark is the asset being licensed, so trademark filings and the franchise documents tend to move together. A firm that handles both keeps that work under one roof.

International franchising also appears on the service list. Taking a US brand abroad brings in foreign disclosure rules and cross-border licensing terms, which is a different body of law from the domestic FDD process.

How the team is built

The attorneys page names twelve lawyers. Nate Greenberg is listed as Of Counsel; the others appear as attorneys without stated titles.

Several bios describe where the lawyer worked before franchise law. Josh Lignana began his career as a Wall Street trader. Evan Harra started in bank-related litigation. Avery Korman did legal writing and legislative work on Capitol Hill.

Andrew Matson brings a franchisee's perspective to the team and graduated law school from Temple. That background sits opposite the firm's franchisor client base, which gives the team a view of how the other party reads the same documents.

Experience the site states

Stephanie Grobler has been with Spadea Lignana since 2003. That is the longest tenure the site names, and it puts at least one member of the team more than two decades into the firm's franchise work.

Javier Esteve has helped launch over 75 franchise systems, according to his bio. Melissa Lenhard is described as a lawyer with over 15 years of experience. Tabitha David has over ten years of business and legal experience and joined after prior work elsewhere.

Elliot Boerman is a franchise and corporate attorney who works with emerging and established brands. James McCauley helps emerging brands prepare for franchising. Jessica Dempsey counsels franchisors on the legal and strategic aspects of building and scaling their brands.

Where the firm operates

Spadea Lignana calls its Philadelphia location a national headquarters. It lists further offices for New York and Cincinnati, each with its own phone line.

The national framing fits the work. Franchise registration is a state-by-state process, and a franchisor selling in multiple states deals with multiple regulators at once. Franchise counsel usually works across state lines by necessity, wherever the office happens to be.

In my opinion, the three-office structure reads as a firm that grew around its client base. Philadelphia carries the headquarters label and the main phone numbers appear in the site header.

Billing and client systems

The firm offers a flat monthly fee option under a billing model it calls CORE. That structure suits franchisors, whose legal needs recur on a calendar: the annual FDD update, the renewal filings, the trademark maintenance dates.

In January 2022 the firm launched a Client Access Portal, shortened to CAP. It's a cloud-based system that lets franchisors check the status of their state registrations and FDD updates.

A franchisor with registrations pending in a dozen states has a real tracking problem. The portal puts that status where the client can look at it directly. As a reviewer, I'd note that building client-facing software is a step beyond what most firms of this size take on, and the January 2022 date gives it a track record of several years.

Published material

Spadea Lignana runs a Learning Center where it publishes articles and news. The firm offers a free initial consultation.

What the record shows

The firm's legal name is Spadea Lignana LLC, and it also goes by Spadea Lignana Franchise Attorneys. The site does not state a founding year, though Stephanie Grobler's 2003 start date puts the firm's operation back at least that far.

What the website documents is a franchise-focused firm with twelve named lawyers, three offices, a defined service list and two client-facing systems it built itself. The bios give career backgrounds and, for three attorneys, years or systems counts.

For a franchisor weighing counsel, the checkable items here are the named attorneys, the stated service list, the 2003 tenure and the January 2022 portal launch date. A brand preparing to franchise for the first time, an established franchisor facing its annual registration cycle, or a system looking at international expansion would find matching services on the firm's own list.

The firm maintains a Facebook presence at facebook.com/spadealaw. Its site names no other social channels.

In my opinion, the clearest signal in this listing is the narrowness of the practice. Franchise law, trademarks and franchise disputes are the three areas the site describes, and each connects to the same client type. The firm's public material keeps returning to franchisors and the documents they file.