Technology startups

Russell-Cooke's technology and growth team has helped numerous software, tech, mobile and web startups get off the ground. Tech businesses bring their own challenges (data protection, intellectual property registration and protection, online trading, international jurisdictions etc.) as well as traditional legal issues like dealing with employment issues for businesses and shareholder partnership joint venture agreements.

We provide specialist commercial advice tailored to your business, based on a deep knowledge of the sector. We know keeping control of costs and budgets is critical when you start your business and in the early stages of growth it is important it is to get the right legal advice from the outset to avoid problems later which may affect the value of your business

Russell-Cooke's tech startup legal pack provides you with a flexible package of specialist legal advice, documents and registrations, adapted for your business, at a competitive fixed price.

Russell-Cooke's tech startup legal pack includes:

• an initial no-obligation telephone consultation to discuss the services we can provide to your business and how we are able to assist you
• advice on the legal requirements of your business (what you need to do or to get started)
• as many (or as few) of our deliverables as you need at a competitive fixed price.

The deliverables may include the following:

• company formation
• terms of use and terms and conditions for e-commerce
• privacy policy and data protection policies
• non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)
• shareholders, co-founder or partnership agreements
• data processing and data hosting agreements
• software licence terms
• security documents (debenture or legal charge) 'software as a service' subscription agreements
• domain name and trade mark advice and registrations
• self-employed consultant contract
• employment contracts
• employee handbook
• articles of association/constitution
• loan agreements

We will discuss your business plan with you and advise you on the legal requirements of your business on a free, no-obligation basis. If you have a limited budget we can help to prioritise your legal requirements. We will break down your requirements into individual fixed-price deliverables. We will liaise with our specialist employment law team to deal with particular employment law deliverables.

You will have the peace of mind of having obtained professional advice while controlling your costs.

We offer a fixed price package designed for cost conscious startups and growing technology businesses offering specialist advice, documents and registrations. Many law firms are reluctant to offer a fixed price for legal work and this uncertainty means many businesses do not get legal advice at the outset, which can lead to issues later on.

Members of Russell-Cooke's technology and growth team regularly provide training to founders and entrepreneurs on the legal fundamentals of operating a tech business in the UK.

Industry expertise

Examples of our work include:

• Entrepreneur training: Guy Wilmot regularly gives training sessions to startup entrepreneurs to teach the legal fundamentals of operating a tech business in the UK. Please contact Guy Wilmot for details of the training or a copy of training materials.
• Fundraising: the team has helped numerous businesses with equity fundraising. This has included institutional rounds and raising funds from individual investors claiming SEIS and EIS relief. Businesses advised on fundraising include Bitposter and Address Intelligence and Phrasee.
• Terms of use/commercial agreements: we frequently advise businesses with novel concepts on their terms of use and commercial agreements. Examples include Ruuby (a booking app for beauty treatments and therapies), JustPark (a peer to peer parking service), Surge Corp (a peer to peer short term rentals business introducing the concept of surge pricing) and Onefinestay.

Russell-Cooke offers a 30 minute initial consultation (free of charge) in order to discuss the services we can provide to your business. While we will be constructive and helpful on this call, please be aware that we cannot provide legal advice that you can rely on until we have set you up as a client of the firm.

With our startup pack we can provide your new business with as many standard documents and applications as may be required, on a competitive fixed-fee basis allowing you to keep to a fixed budget.