Action

Apart from providing all-round legal advice on routine matters, we also assist our clients at all stages of corporate development, from incorporation to restructuring and overcoming a financial crisis, culminating if necessary in preparing and conducting insolvency procedure and liquidating the company.

In particular in the case of start-ups and family businesses with their particular circumstances, familiarity with the business environment and awareness of the medium- and long-term aims of the persons involved are imperative. We help our clients not only with developing first business models, but also with drafting business plans for their actual implementation. Using thorough knowledge of the business concept and its objectives as a starting point, we draw up all the necessary contracts ranging from founding partnerships and corporations, licensing-in and licensing-out know-how and hiring executives, know-how carriers and other staff, to taking out loans and admitting additional shareholders under a shareholding agreement that specifies performance-related draw-down terms. We specialise in drafting the terms of contracts for financing venture capital, taking the interests of all sides into account by including e.g. call/put provisions, option clauses such as tag-along and drag-along terms, good-leaver/bad-leaver clauses and double-dip rules for the benefit of the financial investor. Similarly, we prepare employee participation programs and formulate exit strategies, e.g. an IPO or “going public”.

In the run-up to insolvency procedure, we advise the management first and foremost by informing it about possible forms of alternative action, providing instructions on compulsory duties and obligatory rules with which compliance is imperative, pointing out personal liability risks that might arise, and explaining any consequences under penal law that need to be avoided.