Jeffrey Taylor Makoff

Jeffrey (Jeff) Makoff's practice includes advising California individuals and businesses on the rights and obligations of fiduciaries and beneficiaries, fraud and undue influence, marital rights, intellectual property, and the property and other rights of unmarried intimate partners. He also handles management, control, governance, and employment matters in high technology, finance, media, and other industries, and negotiates buyouts and management agreements for corporations/LLCs, partnerships, proprietorships, estates, and their stakeholders. Mr. Makoff handles contested corporate and LLC disputes and dissolutions (called “founder friction” or “business divorce”), as well as consent solicitations, proxy contests, and involuntary buyouts. He handles owner-funded, business-funded and lender financed buyouts (including SBA funded transactions).

Mr. Makoff received his J.D. in 1985 from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where he published his Note on Attorney-Client Privilege in the European Communities after A.M. & S. v. Commission: The Secret Is Out. He received his BA in 1981, cum laude, from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2013, Mr. Makoff completed the week-long “Mediating Disputes” program at the Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation.

Mr. Makoff served as Co-Chair of the Committee on Business Litigation of the Business Law Section of the California State Bar and is a former Trustee of the UC Hastings Law School Foundation. He was trained at the leading international law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom under trial lawyers Frank Rothman, Bill Masterson, Mike Diamond, and Jim Lyons. Mr. Makoff worked on many of the major West Coast corporate control battles of the 1980s era.