James M. Pool

With over 30 years of experience representing clients in both the health care and the tax exempt sectors, Jim serves as Chair of Maynard Cooper’s Health Care and Charitable Foundations-Tax Exempt Organizations practice groups. He represents all types of providers and payors to best position them to respond to quickly changing health care regulatory, tax, compliance and other related matters. He also represents a large number of tax exempt entities, both inside and outside the health care industry.

Clients turn to Jim for his respected knowledge, broad-based experience, and active legal and risk management advice in the business of health care. For many of the firm’s clients, Jim serves in an outside General Counsel role to assist them not only with accomplishing their strategic initiatives, but also to serve as a trusted advisor to whom they can readily turn for advice with respect to both legal and business decisions. He has the intuitive insight to effectively and efficiently discern the diverse legal needs of this ever changing industry, and his skills and talents in the field have earned him the preeminent recognition as a Band 1 leading practitioner in Healthcare by Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business.

Jim’s distinguished health care practice includes the following services:

• Working with clients to structure integration, co-management, affiliation, and joint venture arrangements that implicate health care, antitrust and tax concerns
• Dealing with all levels of health care regulatory issues, including the Stark, Anti-Kickback, Civil Monetary Penalties Laws, 340B Drug Pricing Program, and tax law issues
• Implementing alternative payment arrangement and collaborative delivery systems in both commercial and government payor settings, including Medicaid and Medicare bundled payment programs
• Managing all aspects of compliance planning with regard to tax and health care regulation at both the state and federal levels, including financial aid policies and HIPAA and cybersecurity issues
• Assisting clients with internal and external audits and investigations

Through his representation of clients in the health care area, many of which are tax exempt, Jim has developed a significant amount of experience representing charitable and tax exempt organizations of all types and sizes on complex regulatory and business issues, including entity choice, private foundation rules, intermediate sanctions, unrelated business income, and governance.

"Jim is very competent, responsive and always willing to assist in any way that he can. His knowledge, and his ability to communicate and apply that knowledge, is outstanding."

"Jim is very highly rated as a negotiator, has high ethics and is a very pleasant, capable and confident lawyer. He is very good at working with hospitals and in the financing practice too. He is probably a go-to for small hospital groups looking to do expansions and, say, funding that through fund finance."

"Jim is part of the reason we keep going back to Maynard Cooper. He knows me, he understands what or where I am, and how my organization works, or how the organizations I work with work. He does a good job of asking questions and makes you think about things before you do it. He is good at pointing out things that may create compliance or business concerns."

"Jim is the person I call. He is highly intelligent, very knowledgeable of the information and the organization and its needs. I am very impressed by his intelligence."

"Jim is always incredibly responsive and immensely competent. I am thankful for his guidance and assistance."

Affiliations

• American Health Lawyers Association
  • Tax and Finance
  • Fraud and Abuse
• Alabama State Bar Association, Heath Law Section
• Birmingham Bar Association
• Alabama Law Institute, The Nonprofit Committee

Civic Involvement

• Alabama School of Fine Arts, Board Member, Executive Committee
• Advent Episcopal School, Board Member, Executive Committee
• St. Martin's in the Pines Senior Living Community, Finance Committee

• October 28-30, 2016: MedAxiom CV Transforum Fall Conference, co-presentation with Shareholder Joel Porter "Financial Opportunities Under the New Cardiac Bundles"
• July 29, 2016: 36th National Symposium for Healthcare Executives, panel presentation "New Governmental Focuses on Fraud and Abuse Enforcement"
• February 19, 2016: Client Presentation, "HIPAA Training and Employee Compliance Education"
• February 15, 2016: Client Presentation, "Annual Regulatory Update and Health Care Compliance Issues"
• September 28, 2015: Warren Averett Healthcare Symposium, "Top Legal Issues for 2015"
• July 30, 2015: UAB National Symposium of Healthcare Executives, "Top 15 for 2015: Practical Legal Updates for Today's Healthcare Environment"
• May 8, 2015: Alabama Healthcare Executives Forum, "Recent Medicare Innovation and Compliance Risks"
• September 25, 2014: Warren Averett 2014 Symposium, "Taking Care of Providers: Peer Review and Quality Assurance Procedures and Responding to Heath Care Reform Initiatives"
• June 13, 2014: American College of Surgeons, Alabama and Mississippi Chapter Annual Meeting, "Future of Care Delivery and Reimbursement"
• April 11, 2014: American College of Healthcare Executives, "Legal Trends and Cautionary Tales for 2014"
• January 10, 2014: Primary Care and Specialty Collaborative Conference, "Shared Savings Models"