Specialist legal advice and support for Emerging Tech and Life Science companies
We have established a reputation as a leading legal adviser to tech startups and scaleups.
Working from our London, Watford, Bristol and Birmingham offices, we take a common sense and highly commercial approach to supporting our tech and life science startup and scaleup clients by:
- Ensuring that all of our legal advice is partner led and using senior lawyers to offer the benefit of their broad commercial experience
- Providing free or fixed fee documents
- Where appropriate, offering sensible time to pay arrangements to help accommodate your cash flow challenges.
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Experienced tech startup lawyers
Unlike many professional advisers, we recognise the importance of using more senior and specialist lawyers to support the development of your business in its early stages.
Our award winning, 45 lawyer, Emerging Tech & Life Sciences team comprises 21 partners and 24 other specialist lawyers who advise our startup and scaleup clients on a broad range of legal matters, including:
- The appropriate business structure and drafting shareholder agreements
- Private equity, venture capital and angel fundraising, including investments under SEIS, EIS and VCT investment schemes
- Share schemes including EMI schemes and other tax support
- Intellectual property issues, including protection and exploitation of IP in the UK and internationally
- Technology and information system projects, e-commerce and risk management
- Privacy and data protection, including GDPR compliance
- All aspects of contract formation and contract management
- Material transfer agreements and other specialist life science contractual agreements
- Employment and service contracts for executive directors, non-executive directors and employees
- The provision of standard employment policies and advice on legally and HMRC compliant employee benefit packages, including pensions, incentives, minimum wage, leave entitlements, part time and flexible working
- Business immigration compliance, licence and visa applications and renewals
- The grant of leases and sub-leases of commercial property.
We work closely with the Bristol-based and Bath-based teams at SETsquared, which according to the UBI index is the world's leading university business incubator.
lawyers-in-residence supporting incubators and accelerators
We work closely with the Bristol-based and Bath-based team at SETsquared which is the #3 startup hub in Europe (as ranked in the Financial Times and Statista’s report on Europe’s leading start-up hubs).
We provide a weekly, 3 hour, free-of-charge "lawyer-in-residence" service to SETsquared Bristol and a similar fortnightly service to SET squared Bath, services which we have provided since 2009 and 2014 respectively.
We also provide a weekly, 3 hour, free-of-charge "lawyer-in-residence" service to Science Creates Incubators
We also provide legal surgeries, in-residence support and workshops to other UK incubators and accelerators, including MedCity, Rothamsted Enterprises, Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst and Pioneer Group. Annually, we spend at least 500 hours "in-residence" at these incubators.
Our startup lawyers are committed to helping tech startups and entrepreneurs grow their businesses and provide a specialist legal service tailored to the needs and stage of the client.
The advice, the manner in which the advice was given, and the understanding and expertise shown by our team was high quality. I should also remark upon the responsiveness, which was always as we required.
Example deals for tech and life science startups and scaleups
- Acting for the shareholders of University of Bath spin-out, Gen3D on their exit to US NASDAQ-listed corporate, Altair
- Acting for fast-growing data intelligence business Ripjar on a $36.8m (£29.3m) investment by New York-based investor, Long Ridge, and a subsequent equity investment by Dow Jones.
- Acting for University of Bristol biotech spin-out, CytoSeek, on a £3.57m EIS investment led by deep tech investment fund, Science Creates Ventures, supported by Parkwalk, Meltwind, Luminous Ventures, UKI2S and a syndicate of angel investors.
- Advising vaccine technology scale-up, Imphoron, on a £2.4m seed round extension, involving Octopus Ventures and SCVC and a new investor, the Meiji Yasuda Future Innovation Fund L.P (managed by Global Brain)
- Acting for agri-tech scale-up, Lettus Grow, on a £2.35 million investment round led by Longwall Venture Partners LLP and supported by the University of Bristol Enterprise Fund II (managed by Parkwalk) and a syndicate of other investors including Bethnal Green Ventures and ClearlySo.
- Acting for Next Green Car Limited t/a Zap Map on an initial investment by Good Energy and advising the co-founders of Zap Map on a £9m Series A investment by Fleetcor and Good Energy - for further details please see Zap-Map raises £9m Series A funding to expand charging app services - Zapmap
- Advising health-tech scale-up, Forth, on a £1.6m venture capital investment by Trajan Scientific & Medical and existing investment, The Development Bank of Wales - Forth Raises £1.6M to Launch Ground-breaking FemTech product (forthwithlife.co.uk)
- Acting for Inovo Robotics on an initial £1,500,000 investment by Foresight Williams Technology EIS Fund and a subsequent follow on investment of £1,500,000 by the same fund.
- Acting for metrology and automation scale-up, INSPHERE, on a £1.5 million investment from the Foresight Williams Technology EIS Fund, a subsequent follow on investment of £1,000,000 by the same fund and a recent £3.7m investment by Foresight (as manager of both EIS and VCT funds) and by West Hill Capital.
- Acting for Bristol-based cell technology start-up, Celltris, on all aspects (other than tax) of its seed investment by QantX, the South West based SEIS/EIS venture capital fund.
- Advising tech start-up, Swallow, on its $1,000,000 pre-seed round, which saw the Company receive significant backing from two leading early stage institutional investors
- Acting for an established, private-equity backed, ecommerce business on a multi-million-pound exit to a trade buyer.
For more information about our approach to working with tech and life science startups, please see our startup and early stage company advisory pages, or contact Nathan Guest on 0117 314 5289.
