Corporate Lawyers
We take the time to understand you, your business, and the sector you operate in to ensure every transaction runs smoothly. By understanding your needs and requirements from the outset, we can anticipate challenges and address risks proactively.
With a team of excellent corporate lawyers, supported by seamlessly integrated specialists, we create a clear project plan tailored to you. This approach helps us navigate complexities, pre-empt potential hurdles, and drive transactions forward to meet your deadlines.
Our corporate lawyers are committed to delivering technically excellent, commercially focused advice nationally.
We specialise in complex corporate transactions, including mergers and acquisitions (both domestic and international), management buyouts, joint ventures, group restructuring, and strategic investments.
We work with a broad range of clients, from entrepreneurs, SMEs, and family-owned businesses to high-growth start-ups, private equity investors, public companies, and international corporates. Our experience also extends to banks, finance houses, charities, social enterprises, and educational institutions.
Many of the deals we advise on involve local owner-managed, entrepreneur-led, and family-run businesses. In addition to this, though, we have also focussed on a select number of key sectors, which has enabled us to build a corporate practice with a strong national and international reputation, allowing us to provide sector-specific insights that add real value to our clients.
We believe that clear communication and an excellent rapport with our clients is key to a successful outcome, and will always prioritise this.
Our expertise
Our team of corporate lawyers provide advice in a number of areas:
All businesses need appropriate funding to thrive and grow. We advise lenders and borrowers on all types of banking and finance matters including acquisition finance, borrower finance, development finance and real estate finance.
Our team of expert lawyers can guide you through B Corp certification, embedding purpose and impact into your business's constitution and strategy, and creating positive impact for your stakeholders, the community and the environment.
The decision to relinquish control of your business can be challenging. This could be due to the difficulty of finding an appropriate successor or the desire to ensure a sale at the right price. One approach that we believe deserves more recognition is the option of giving or selling your business to an Employee Ownership Trust.
We understand that you operate in a global economy. Whether you are a UK business exporting or importing your products and services, an overseas business investing in the UK or an individual with interests abroad, we can offer you the legal support you need to succeed.
We advise on putting together structures (be they limited companies, partnerships, limited liability partnerships or collaboration agreements) that enable the parties to operate the joint venture as they see fit, but appropriately safeguarding commercial interests.
We close over 150 deals in any year of all shapes-and-sizes. The majority of our mergers and acquisitions and buy-out deals are valued at between £5m and £50m - we are experts at advising on M&A deals of this size. However, we act regularly on smaller strategic or bolt on/buy-and-build acquisitions and smaller company sale transactions for UK and international corporates, SMEs and family-owned businesses. We also act on transactions with deal values considerably in excess of this.
We act regularly on partnership and LLP matters to include partnership agreements and business structures; partnership disputes; partner expulsions, retirements, performance issues & de-equitisation; and partnership incorporations.
We advise start-up, scale-up and other early stage companies (including University spin-outs) on pre-seed, seed and later series funding (including SEIS, EIS and VCT funding) from both UK and international investors. We also advise established companies on private equity and venture capital deals, whether to fund management buy-outs or to fund growth or development capital. We also advise established companies and their owners on exits to private equity-backed groups, including the terms upon which they may be rolling some of their proceeds into the acquiring group.
We advise our clients regularly on corporate restructuring and reorganisations.
The Corporate Team includes experienced and specialist start-up lawyers, dedicated to providing common sense, commercial and value added legal advice to entrepreneurs, start-ups, scale-ups and other early stage businesses (including university 'spin-outs').
VWV were proactive, commercial and very pragmatic throughout the process. The team were responsive, helpful and consistently had a strong appreciation of the financial drivers and realities.
Our work highlights
We were instructed to support a substantial, international manufacturing group on a significant global restructuring project.
This involved the creation of a holding company and an intermediate holding company and then the acquisition of trading companies in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, US, Canada and The Netherlands. This was a hugely complex project, with tax advice delivered by a Big Four accountancy firm. Our role included sourcing and project managing the input of law firms in each of the other jurisdictions.
We acted for a longstanding client on certain aspects of the majority investment by its existing US private equity investor and other matters relating to that investment.
In providing that advice, we worked closely with the management team and the investor's lawyers, including preparing a significant suite of ancillary documents relating to the issue and acquisition of a significant number of shares, and also supporting the directors with the preparation of a disclosure letter and supporting documents. This deal also involved us working with associate firms in Australia and the United States.
We acted for the shareholders of a UK based international pharmaceutical company on a multi-million pound sale.
Our specialism in the pharmaceutical sector was key to being instructed on the transaction and was invaluable in the negotiation process. Due to the mixture of US and English law applying to different elements of the sale documents and the target having subsidiaries in the Middle East and the Republic of Ireland, our role involved not only leading and advising on all English law aspects but coordinating and liaising with foreign counsel across multiple jurisdictions, all within a tight timeframe to ensure a tax deadline was met.
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