Freeborn & Peters:
Legal Services for the Food Industry.

About Us

Freeborn & Peters is a Chicago-based law firm that is always looking ahead and seeking to find better ways to serve its clients. It takes a proactive approach to ensure its clients are more informed, prepared and able to achieve greater success – not just now, but in the future. Freeborn & Peters is a firm that lives up to its core values of integrity, caring, effectiveness, teamwork and commitment, and embodies them through high standards of client service and responsive action. Its lawyers build close and lasting relationships with clients and are driven to help them achieve their legal and business objectives.

Our Vision

Our country’s food industry is more than providing what’s for breakfast, lunch or dinner. It provides nutrition for the nation, creates millions of jobs and sustains thousands of support industries.

Americans consume approximately $1 trillion in food annually. Add what it takes to grow, package, distribute and sell what we eat, and it’s easy to see how the food industry fuels a broad network of economic activity.

Within this vast array of people, products and process, the Freeborn & Peters Food Industry Team is dedicated to helping our clients build a better future for the food industry.

Our Values

Legal knowledge and business experience represent the mind of our organization. Our approach to business represents our heart. Our corporate culture is collegial in nature—we support and encourage one another in the pursuit of integrity, respect and care for our clients and community. Key to our approach is this set of core values:

Teamwork:  Through open and honest communication we make and support decisions in the firm’s best interests, subordinating self-interest.

Commitment:  We take personal responsibility to go above and beyond to solve even the toughest problems.

Integrity:  We do the right thing for the right reason.

Effectiveness:  We demand excellence, creativity and execution for ourselves and each other.

Caring:  Our team is respectful, loving and caring.

Collectively, our core values have contributed greatly to our being included in the Great Places to Work® Rankings: 2011 Best Small and Medium Workplaces.

Our Clients

Below is a representative sample of our clients and those companies whose interests we serve within the food industry.

The Freeborn & Peters Difference

Having a dedicated team of attorneys with both legal and industry experience is only part of the Freeborn & Peters equation. How we work with our clients plays an equal role in what sets us apart from other firms. Our “recipe” for a better future of the food industry includes:

• Working collaboratively with clients. By way of examples, we helped one of the world’s largest manufacturers and distributors of carbonated beverages implement a value pricing strategy, represented a significant creditor in a chapter 11 proceeding in upstate New York, and represented a gourmet sandwich franchisor in the sale of a minority interest to a San Francisco-based private equity firm.
• Applying specific food industry expertise and knowledge. Our extensive knowledge of the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act has allowed us to serve as lead trial counsel for our client in a successful effort to enforce its PACA trust rights against a corporate Debtor and its main principal. And serve as lead counsel for another client in obtaining full recovery of principal, interest and attorneys’ fees after all other creditors settled for pennies on the dollar.
• Bringing a range of legal disciplines to bear on clients’ issues. From protecting intellectual property to facilitating real estate acquisition to providing counsel in initial public offerings, we provide vast experience covering a wide range of client issues.
• Acting as a coordinator of multiple professional services. Freeborn & Peters is an astute manager of multiple professional services, such as public accounting, banking and insurance—for our clients. As we’ve demonstrated with clients, such as Jimmy John’s, we’re adept at assembling a team of professionals together to seamlessly work together to quickly achieve our clients’ goals.
• Looking ahead for new opportunities and challenges. Mandatory Preventive Controls and Foreign Supplier Verification are just two of the upcoming provisions in the Food Safety Modernization Act on which our attorneys will be counseling our clients in the coming months.