Growing your business

How I can help your growing business

There comes a point when you take a plunge with the next big step of your business. This may be such things as taking on office space, hiring an employee, winning a big customer, taking on associates or placing a large order with a supplier. At this stage, it is more important than ever to get the legals right. Things that can go wrong if you don’t have a good contract protecting your position include:

• an employee could sue you for unfair dismissal if you dismiss without notice and don’t have a contract recording the common situations when you can terminate without notice
• one of your consultants could start up on his own and poach your customers if you don’t have a contract including restrictive covenants
• a big customer could cancel its contract leaving you with wasted stock if you haven’t duly tied them into the order in a written contract
• the landlord could put up your rent on your office space if you haven’t negotiated a cap on the rent increase clause in the lease
• a big supplier could delay in delivering the order to you, leaving you with a shortage of stock and angry customers who haven’t received their goods by the promised date

It is always worth talking to a lawyer BEFORE things go wrong as it will be much cheaper and easier to put the protection into place at the start rather than trying to resolve a legal matter once something has gone wrong.

I can help you by providing the following affordable legal contracts:

• employment agreement
• consultancy agreement
• customer contract
• supplier contract
• review of office lease (normally provided by the landlord)
• IT supply contract
• software development agreement

All of these contracts will be bespoke for your business and your circumstances. We would arrange a time to talk on the phone and I would gather all the necessary information I need from you in order to draft a contract fully protecting your position. I would then follow this call up with an email setting out the quote for the price of work. On most matters I am happy to offer a fixed fee, something that not many lawyers are prepared to do as they prefer the time based method of charging (see the fees page of this website for more information). I aim to have a bespoke contract to you within the week. You then review the contract and if we need to tweak any parts of it, I will do that for you.

If you would like me to negotiate the contract with your customer, supplier, consultant etc, then I would quote an additional fee for this. Similarly, if you have a contract that you want me to review, I would quote a fee for reviewing (as opposed to drafting) such contract.

It is almost always easier for me to draft a contract from scratch for you rather than you try to draft something and me ‘legalise’ it for you.