Kimberly M. Butler

Villanova University School of Law, J.D., cum laude, Order of the Coif; Executive Editor, Villanova Law Review

Dartmouth College, A.B.

• Worked with a new business startup analyzing numerous aspects involved in the business’s formation, such as: business ownership, investment structure, management, business location, property acquisitions, permitting, financing, and launch date. Once the client’s goals were laid out, Kim managed all legal aspects necessary to get the business up and running, including: negotiating the project real estate acquisition, assisting with site permitting, creating real estate holding and operating companies, structuring investment classes within the operating company to allow for diversified equity investment, and working with lenders to successfully complete project financing.
• On behalf of a national real estate development company, successfully managed the acquisition of over 1,000 acres of property from multiple owners to allow the client to create a large property core for eventual mixed-use commercial real estate development centered on an existing Vermont ski resort. Kim oversaw all property acquisition negotiations, and worked extensively with the client on numerous development diligence and project permitting matters.
• Successfully guided a business owner through an aggressively contested ownership dispute. Faced with challenges from minority owners, and possible disruption of existing franchise and financing relationship, Kim helped the client achieve 100% ownership through negotiated buyout of the minority interests, including overseeing certain litigated aspects of the buyout, and completion of franchise restructuring and business refinancing aspects to allow the purchase of the minority interests.
• Directed a complex loan workout for a commercial lender with a long-standing borrower that had attempted to negotiate a private sale of its business. Complicated by claims from the party to which the borrower had sought to sell its business, the lender’s goal was to maximize loan recovery while cooperating with its borrower. Kim successfully negotiated a collateral transfer agreement with the lender’s borrower, which allowed the lender to preserve and maximize collateral value, while overseeing the successful prosecution of state and federal court actions for collateral conversion by borrower’s potential buyer.
• Represented a Vermont-based American subsidiary of an international manufacturing company in connection with debt restructuring brought about by its lender’s election to exit lending in the client’s industry. With the client facing the need to respond immediately to changes in its lending structure, Kim helped the client develop and analyze options, and structure and implement debt and equity refinancing in a very compressed time frame. Kim’s ability to respond rapidly and work with the client, its parent and new lenders, allowed the client to accomplish the necessary debt restructuring without any negative impact to operations.

New Hampshire, 1994

Vermont, 1994

Law clerk to the Honorable John A. Dooley, III, Vermont Supreme Court, 1993 to 1994.

• New Hampshire Bar Association
• Vermont Bar Association