Legal advice for startups

We can advise you on all aspects of fundraising from seed stage through to angel funding, Series A and later stage rounds, including SEIS and EIS rounds.

We regularly assist founders with equity financing from direct investments for shares to convertible instruments and advance subscription arrangements often called SAFEs (simple agreements for future equity) or ASAs (advanced subscription agreements).

We work with clients across a broad range of sectors. We mostly work with companies and founders, although we also work with investors.

We keep things simple, but it never take a one-size-fits-all approach.

We will work with you to set-up share option schemes (EMI and unapproved / non-tax-advantaged), CSOPs, restricted share / reverse vested arrangements and growth share schemes to incentivise staff at all levels within a business.

We can help determine the best incentives structure for your company and work with you to put in place a tailored scheme to meet the needs of your business and the individuals within it.

Any commercial agreement or set of terms is a legal document. but it is also a sales document. It needs to protect you, but it also needs to present well and look good. Any contract or agreement which you issue in your name needs to reflect your approach and, ideally, should be in language that doesn’t need a lawyer to understand it.

We will not try and charge you for reinventing the wheel but we will tell you if a ‘standard’ document is not going to work, and why.

As well as what a document says, you may also need some advice about how you use a contract or set of terms in your business – does the agreement need to be signed? Will an electronic signature work? What’s the best way of making sure we don’t make mistakes when we issue a contract? We can help you answer these questions.

All business deal with data, but GDPR and data protection law can be daunting to navigate.

But we believe that, fundamentally, the principles (if not the detail) of data regulation are simple and that with a little understanding and guidance, GDPR compliance can be straightforward.

We will explain in simple terms what the requirements are and help you put together a set of policies and documents to make sure you are compliant.