Dan’s transactional and commercial practice encompasses a broad variety of business legal needs, and he acts as a wide-ranging legal advisor to companies big and small. Whether the company is just starting, approaching a sale, or anywhere in the middle, Dan can provide targeted and thorough counsel. Dan’s practice encompasses several disciplines, including:
- Commercial loan documentation and negotiation, from small credit facilities up to facilities in excess of $1 billion;
- Business and real estate transactions, including acquisitions and sales of companies and real estate;
- Office and industrial leases and subleases;
- New business formation and structuring;
- Existing business restructuring and organization;
- Joint ventures;
- Kansas and Missouri local counsel opinion letters, including entity and enforceability opinions;
- Supply and sales of goods agreements;
- Subcontracting agreements;
- UCC issues;
- Employment agreements; and
- Easements.
Dan’s clients operate in a variety of fields, including financial, retail and industrial. He readily works with attorneys and colleagues in other practice areas like environmental services and intellectual property, providing clients with comprehensive legal representation. Dan also has significant experience with representing clients in business litigation, which provides valuable perspective for all kinds of business transactions.
Dan honed his writing skills in law school, where he served as the case note editor for the University of Missouri – Kansas City’s The Urban Lawyer. He also mentored other law students as a teaching assistant for a legal writing class, and he earned the Candler S. Rogers Legal Writing Award for his published article on the religious ministerial exception to Title VII employment discrimination law. The article describes the Catholic understanding of ministry, applied the religious ministerial exception to Catholic institutions, and offered suggestions for clarifying the law in the future.
Before attending law school, Dan worked in business-to-business sales at AT&T, where he developed an in-depth understanding of the telecommunications industry and an instinct for evaluating his clients’ business needs. Dan also refined his ability to explain complicated, multifaceted concepts in a simple, clear way, reflecting the custom needs of his clients.
Publications and Presentations
Presenter, Corporate Governance Refresher: Judiciary Duties, the Business Judgment Rule and Avoiding Piercing the Corporate Veil Claims, Update of the Law CLE Webinar, June 6, 2024.
Presenter, Examining Contract Boilerplate and Why It Matters to Commercial Litigators, CLE, Association of Corporate Counsel - Tampa (with Marty Behn, September 19, 2019).
Presenter, Data Breach Litigation, Association of Defense Trial Attorneys (with William Sampson, August 19, 2016).
Presenter, The Big Payback: Retaliation, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Kansas City Seminar (August 11, 2016).
William Sampson, Al Saikali & Dan Schwaller, Standing in Data Breach Cases: A Changing Legal Landscape and a Few Suggestions for Counsel, In-House Defense Quarterly, Winter 2016, at 10.
Daniel Schwaller, What is a Catholic Minister? Applying the Religious Ministerial Exception in Light of Catholic Teaching, 83 UMKC L. Rev. 473 (2014).