What we doCommercial
We provide pragmatic and commercially focused legal advice in connection with all types of business relationships including pan-European and international arrangements.
We work with our clients in connection with both their customer and supplier relationships to ensure that these meet their business needs and appropriately manage their risks. In each case we take the time to help our clients identify potential liabilities and to understand their own desired risk profiles.
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Typically we assist with the preparation and negotiation of contracts and the provision of related advice, which is aimed at guaranteeing the supply of goods and services, ensuring revenue streams and protecting intellectual property assets. This includes distribution, agency and reseller arrangements, terms and conditions of sale, collaboration and co-operation agreements, maintenance and support contracts and software and technology licences.
We also have extensive experience of providing advice in connection with a variety of complex, and often international, contractual arrangements. These often take the form of framework agreements and master services agreements and, for managing multiple service providers, service integration and management agreements (SIAM).
The commercial advice we provide can also guide you in your dealings with consumers, carrying out business online and ensuring your compliance with the latest data protection and privacy matters, including the latest cyber security requirements.
We are also able to assist our clients with corporate and company law related matters, such as the establishment of new corporate entities, subsequent asset and share sales and various investment matters, from start up through to later stage investments. This includes particular expertise in funding rounds involving EIS and SEIS venture capital schemes.
Technology
Technology now has a key role to play in virtually every business. We combine our technical legal expertise with deep technology sector experience. Our clients are both technology businesses and customers of technology related products and services. This means we are well placed to identify the issues and concerns of all the parties in a business relationship and the key business drivers that are often particular to the technology sector.
Technology is by its nature often innovative and can be disruptive of entire industries as we have traditionally thought of them. We help our clients take advantage of the huge opportunities that this presents to them while protecting their interests and managing any deployment to ensure it aligns with their business requirements.
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We guide our clients through the applicable law and appropriate contractual and licensing arrangements. This includes all those arrangements needed in connection with technological innovation and exploitation, including software and app development, to e-commerce, web based services, digital media and marketing, through to managing the deployment of business critical IT projects and ensuring delivery in accordance with service level commitments.
We work as hard on staying up to date with innovations in technology as we do with the law and its application to such matters and, in particular, to our clients’ businesses. We will provide bespoke, practical and commercial advice to help cut through the complexities and assist our clients in making the right business decisions.
Dispute Resolution
Disputes can be an unfortunate reality of business life. Dealing with them can be expensive, time consuming and complex. We put each client’s business interests first and we work hard to find the right, bespoke solutions, avoiding the expense of protracted disputes wherever possible. In each case we focus on working with our clients to formulate the best strategy, taking into account their commercial requirements while being fully aware of the need to minimise costs and business disruption.
We also regularly work with our clients to help them try and avoid disputes in the first place. Our dispute resolution team often works with our commercial team to help clients manage their contracts or specific projects, particularly on more complex matters. This can be crucial, particularly where there is a commercial need to maintain ongoing relationships, where early warnings and proactive contract management can be the key to avoiding disputes or in giving our clients sufficient control at an early stage to avoid unnecessary escalation.
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Where a dispute is live, we advise on settlement strategies and alternative dispute resolution, but where litigation is inevitable we take a robust and practical approach. Our strategies and approach take into account that a commercial settlement, a successful Court judgment or arbitral award has no value unless it is enforced. Our extensive expertise means we know how best to use the law and procedure to our clients’ advantage. We are able to combine this with in depth experience meaning we know the issues and obstacles that are likely to arise. This maximises the likelihood of achieving our clients’ desired outcomes.
Our experience covers of all types of business and contractual disputes as well as dealing with professional negligence claims, breach of trust or fiduciary duty, theft of confidential information, internal investigations, and accusations of deceit, dishonesty or bribery and corruption.
We have particular specialist expertise in dealing with complex, multi-jurisdictional and high value matters. We assist our clients with every aspect of the process from guiding individuals and businesses through the investigatory process to obtaining or challenging freezing injunctions and search orders through to the tracing of assets and obtaining and enforcing recovery. We are often required to come up with creative solutions for obtaining information and documentation or tracking down assets and are accustomed to working alongside and managing teams of investigators, forensic IT specialists, accountants and foreign lawyers in order to achieve the best results.
International Experience
A significant number of our clients have an international presence or service offering and we regularly assist them with their international business arrangements and often global projects. A large majority of our Dispute Resolution work is also large-scale, complex and multi-jurisdictional, often involving issues of foreign law, with witnesses, assets and documents located throughout the world. Accordingly, we fully appreciate the need to replicate the international footprint and approach of many our clients if we are to properly service them and we believe that being a small, specialist firm is no barrier to exploiting the opportunities afforded by globalisation.
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From the outset we have recognised the need to forge and maintain strong relationships with specialist lawyers and other professionals and service providers in multiple jurisdictions, so that we have been able to develop our own informal network of advisers that we have really got to know and trust. Our partners Carolyn Burbridge and Alastair Shaw are also members of the international network, Select Counsel (www.selectcounsel.law). This is a global network of highly credentialed lawyers who have backgrounds with top-tier ranked large firms, but now operate within more flexible next generation models. We continue to work hard and invest considerable time in reinforcing these relationships and networks so that we can provide our clients with the seamless international service they require, yet still with the personal attention they have come to expect.
Our approach also closely reflects the fact that international commerce is increasingly carried out by smaller, more agile, internationally focused companies. This brings us closer to our clients and makes us more able to “speak their language” as well as being able to provide them with a better and more complete service.
“… great at stretching thinking and coming up with creative solutions to complex commercial/IP issues. Deeply expert while always extremely client focused and easy to work with.”
“Calm and considered, but can absolutely be relied upon to fight your corner … takes on board all the complexities and explains them clearly and concisely in light of the actual commercial risks.”