If you have attended an ACCA Gathering over the past couple of years, you have likely seen presentations from Bill Oemichen. Bill’s extensive background in co-operatives, law, and government relations has made him a valuable contributor to ACCA, as a speaker at our events and as an advisor. In fact, we see so much potential in the support he could offer ACCA and its members that we have been actively working with him to establish an arrangement for him to provide legal and non-legal services through ACCA.

As part of this, for the past few months, Bill has been pursuing accreditation from the Law Society of Canada to practice law and anticipates writing the exam later this year. Once he is licensed to practice law in Alberta, Bill will be able to provide a variety of legal services to ACCA members, including law specific to co-operatives.

In the meantime, Bill is ready and available to provide non-legal services to ACCA members, including:

• Governance, including pre-attorney drafting of articles of incorporation and bylaws, and the preparation of board of director position descriptions, committee charters, and board and committee policies.

• Strategic planning, including facilitating strategic planning sessions, preparing board strategic dashboard and reporting tool, and developing co-operative risk identification and mitigation plans.

• Government relations, including developing response plans to local, provincial or federal regulations impacting co-ops, preparing communication materials for key stakeholders in response to threats or challenges arising from government regulation or takeover challenges by for-profit businesses.

If you want to learn more about the non-legal services Bill may provide now and the legal services we hope he will be able to provide to ACCA members in the future, or if you are already interested in retaining Bill for governance, strategic planning, risk identification and mitigation, or government relations work, please contact Paul Cabaj by phone or by email to set up a meeting.

About Bill:

Bill Oemichen is a licensed attorney in the U.S. states of Wisconsin and Minnesota and has provided co-operative governance and strategic planning services to U.S. co-operatives for nearly three decades and to Canadian co-operatives for the past eight years.  He serves on a number of co-operative boards of directors, has prosecuted boards of directors as a state government official, and has represented co-operative boards as a private attorney.  Bill is a Senior Research Fellow in Risk at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has developed multiple co-operative risk identification and mitigation plans as well as facilitated strategic planning processes for a number of co-operatives.