Jacobs & Associates
Danielle Elias
CORPORATE TRANSACTIONAL ATTORNEY
I represent brands and growing companies on licensing, trademark strategy, commercial contracts, and corporate structuring. My practice focuses on the moments where good legal structure creates leverage and bad legal structure creates damage control.
About
In-house thinking. Outside counsel agility.
I am the founder of Danielle Elias, Esq. PLLC (DELIAS LAW), a boutique transactional firm built around how legal decisions actually play out inside a business. I came to this work the long way. I started in BigLaw on white-collar criminal defense and medical malpractice defense, and then moved in-house at my family's apparel company and at two other fashion brands, working both the legal side and the business side.
That blend of litigator's instincts and in-house commercial judgment is what I bring to every client engagement. I built this firm so growing companies could finally get in-house caliber thinking without paying for full-time in-house overhead.
Inside a company, legal advice is not academic. It is tied to launch dates, retailer relationships, inventory risk, margins, and whether a deal needs to close this week. You are not just reviewing contracts. You are helping decide what the business can realistically do. Most companies call a lawyer when something is already broken. That is the most expensive time to call a lawyer. I work with clients before that point, when legal structure creates leverage instead of damage control.
Credentials
EDUCATION
J.D., Fordham University School of Law
PUBLICATIONS & MEDIA
DELIAS LAW Blog (deliaslaw.com) LinkedIn published articles on licensing, fractional in-house counsel, and brand building
Areas of Focus
Areas of
focus.
Commercial Contracts
Master agreements, vendor contracts, distribution agreements, and sales rep agreements for growing businesses.
Corporate Structuring
Entity formation, operating agreements, and corporate structures that scale with the business.
Fractional In-House Counsel
Consistent legal strategy embedded with leadership teams, scaled to the size of the business, without full-time overhead.
IP Diligence
Intellectual property diligence in acquisitions, financings, and brand transfers to protect and extract value.
Joint Ventures & Acquisitions
Asset acquisitions, intercompany licensing, and joint venture structures with aligned legal and commercial terms.
Licensing & Trademark Strategy
Drafting, negotiation, and sublicensing structures for brands monetizing their IP, names, and product lines.
INDUSTRY ROOTS
Brand building and licensing.
My practice is rooted in the apparel and fashion industries, where I have spent the bulk of my career as in-house counsel for leading brands. The discipline of brand building, protecting trademarks, structuring license deals, managing royalty and distribution rights, and aligning legal terms with commercial strategy, is core to how I think.
The same playbook applies wherever a company is trying to monetize an idea, a name, or a product line. Whether you are a fashion brand expanding into new categories, a startup turning IP into revenue, or an established business restructuring an old license that no longer fits, I help you build, protect, and extract value from the brand you have built.
WHY FRACTIONAL IN-HOUSE COUNSEL
Early legal structure creates leverage.
Most growing companies sit in a difficult middle ground. They are too big to wing it on legal, but not big enough to justify a full-time General Counsel. The result is one of two failure modes: they over-rely on outside counsel for commercially nuanced decisions, or they go without legal strategy entirely until something breaks.
Fractional in-house counsel solves that. I embed with the leadership team, sit inside the deal flow, and provide the same kind of judgment a full-time GC would, scaled to the size of the business. My clients get someone who knows their contracts, their counterparties, and their commercial priorities, on call as needed.
Late legal structure is damage control. I would rather help build a clean foundation than untangle history at the worst possible moment.
Work with Danielle.
Schedule a confidential consultation to discuss your employment matter.
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