It’s important that businesses ensure that they are legally protected in every area of their operations. Unfortunately, most founders and business owners often neglect the need to engage an experienced corporate lawyer to ensure legal security. The most common legal issues faced by Start-Ups and SMEs include establishing the right business structure, protecting business and personal assets, establishing equity ownership and rights, protecting intellectual property, limiting liability with customers and ensuring confidentiality with employees and business partners. These issues can pose a serious threat to a business essentially derailing it before it gets on the tracks.
Don’t wait until legal issues arise to seek the advice of an experienced corporate lawyer. Prevention will always be better than cure. At FirstLink, we provide affordable legal advisory solutions for Start-Ups and SMEs to protect their business interests. It includes:
We provide Start-Ups and SMEs with a Legal Health Check which is an assessment to help ensure that any legal risks to your business are minimised. This includes an evaluation of your:
As a Start-Up or SME, it is your intellectual property such as your name, logo, trade secrets and inventions which differentiates your business in its market. We help businesses protects their intangible assets and mitigate the risks of infringements on your intellectual property using trademarks, patents, copyrights, and confidentiality agreements. This includes:
We review and prepare key commercial and business agreements with founders, customers, suppliers, employees and other stakeholders to protect your business interest. This includes but is not limited to:
It is very common for a business to have a commercial dispute with a competitor, supplier, customer, employee or even business partner. Disputes can potentially drain a business of its resources. We help Start-ups and SMEs resolve their disputes by using various dispute resolution approaches. This includes:
We provide a full-service debt recovery solution from receivable management, initiating the debt recovery proceeding to filing enforcement judgement if necessary. This includes:
We provide advice to shareholders, directors and senior management on a range of corporate governance, regulatory and compliance matters. This includes:
You’re not a corporate lawyer, so you won’t know the various laws which your business needs to comply with or solutions to the most common legal issues faced. Outsourcing your legal services can provide peace of mind by providing the following benefits:
Our attorneys and tax consultants can advise and create the best structure for your business to protect its assets and minimized overall business risk.
We help your business reduce its exposure to liability by ensuring that key areas of your business is protected using the rights agreements and contracts.
We ensure that growing family owned SMEs strengthen their corporate governance systems allowing for greater accountability and transparency between directors and shareholders.
The team at FirstLink has always supported us from inception with our initial company registration providing practical and knowledgeable advice to guide us during the startup process. Fast forward to present – They provide us with both accounting and business advisory services. We feel comfortable and at peace knowing that we can call on Richard and his team at any time day or night to deal with any complex accounting, legal, human resource or business challenge that we’re going through.”
For us, what distinguishes FirstLink from the many accountants we’ve dealt with in the past is their adoption of modern technology to reduce the tedious and administrative processes and their focus on providing clients with not only accounting services but value added advisory and consulting services. As business owners, we’re not necessarily savvy in finance or legal, however, we can always depend on FirstLink for any issue we are facing. We feel like the relationship with FirstLink is more partners for life as oppose to just a client – accountant relationship.
The team at FirstLink introduced our business to Xero accounting. It has given us a lot more control over our financial information and for non-accountants; it is extremely easy to use. The Xero Mobile App easily allows us to send invoices to our customers on the go and tracks when the invoices have been viewed by them. I would definitely recommend Xero and FirstLink to anyone looking to implement cloud software to gain real time financial information to improve their business.
Running a business can be a nightmare. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. However, Richard, Aaron and the team at FirstLink have always been and continue to stay right by my side to provide their professional guidance and advice for every obstacle that we’re faced with. It’s a comprehensive service which is both personal and supportive of my business requirements whether its accounting, tax, human resource or industrial relations disputes.