Commercial law company : Three ways a good corporate lawyer can value add to your business

Commercial law company – Business is growing in Singapore and there is an increasing demand for corporate legal services.  Have you ever wondered why you need to hire a good corporate lawyer when you have a strong internal accounting, operational or deals team?  This article will highlight three ways a good corporate lawyer can value add to your business.

#1: A good commercial lawyer is able to cut to the chase

Most deals are couched either in accounting terms or marketing terms with a lot of commercial jargon thrown into documents.  But what really helps in any transaction is a good commercial law company that is able to quickly cut through the deal term sheet and identify the key commercial points that need to be heavily negotiated in the transaction.  With this list of key commercial terms, the deals team is then able to decide on what terms to push for and what to trade/give up to the counterparty.

Choose a good corporate lawyer to help you with your transaction and protect your interests in the deal.  It is good to assume that the party that does not hire a lawyer will be the one disadvantaged by the terms in the agreements.

#2: Commercial law company – Able to identify key commercial and legal risks that may affect the business

While accountants and auditors qualify financial risks, corporate lawyer quantify legal risks.  We were at a transaction previously and saw that a good corporate lawyer was able to identify the key commercial and legal risks in a transaction just within 5 minutes of discussing the new transaction.  This helped save the businessman a lot of money before investing into the company as they could price in the risk into the purchase price.

What you don’t know will typically cost you must later on when you try to remedy it and if it’s a unsurmountable legal risk you may want to give us on the transaction or face dire financial consequences later when the deal falls through.

#3: Advise you on regulatory issues

There was a Singapore company that told us that they do not need a corporate lawyer and relied just on legal templates.  We told them, yes the templates only go so far to protect you in respect of simple commercial terms but without a corporate lawyer you will not be able to identify potential regulatory issues that may arise in connection with your business.

By way of an example on this point, we would like to cite the case of the director of Brandz who was jailed for 15 months for not drafting a prospectus when he raised 2.8 million in convertible loans.  You can see the news article here. 

In conclusion, finding a good commercial law company is important if you wish to scale your business larger or enter into commercial dealings with third parties. As mentioned above, the party that engages a good corporate law firm may have the advantage when drafting the legal agreements so do choose wisely.