Reduce business risk with integrated commercial and legal risk management
- Profit from assets using franchising, alliances, partnerships and acquisitions
- Avoid costly legal disputes or resolve them effectively, including action to stop infringement of your rights
To provide some guidance, set out below is a structured list of 10 areas of knowledge and expertise we consider or apply when advising clients involved in entrepreneurship. We call the list the Dilanchian KML Framework.
- Market Knowledge – it is helpful in entrepreneurship to know the relevant industry, sector and market and the trends and drivers in them.
- Strategic Planning – it is vital for the entrepreneur to operate with some degree of planning, eg to link what is known about an opportunity to the market conditions. Planning helps map an entrepreneur’s operating environments of law, accounting, economics, science, technology, business and politics. Planning should include preparation of financial documents such as cash flow forecasts.
- Asset Evaluation – asset development requires identification and evaluation of the portfolio of intellectual property in a legal sense (eg trade marks, patents, copyright and confidential information) and the intellectual capital that is to be leveraged.
- Enterprise Structure – entrepreneurship requires linking people with entities and groups of entities, and understanding how to reward and manage employees, contractors and collaborators.
- Document Management – it is valuable to retain knowledge, to both apply it and use it to defend against business and legal challenges. Risk management and legal compliance is usually not possible without the creation and proper management, storage and communication of records and documents.
- Deal Making – a structured approach to making deals helps entrepreneurs in negotiations and in reaching at least preliminary understandings, arrangements and agreements. It also supports subsequent needs in transaction planning, due diligence and project management.
- Contracting – ideally legally binding agreements should be structured based on prior considered deal making activity; otherwise the contract may not relate as much as it should to practical needs.
- Commercialisation – understand the process of commercialisation through each of its stages or phases, which may include licensing, venture finance, trade sales, mergers, business sales and floats. The stages may also include the design, production, marketing, sale, distribution and support of a product, service, technology or business. It may also be relevant to understand and apply to these – design upgrades (including new versions or editions), customisation of offerings (eg for specific markets or classes of customers) and offerings extension (eg brand extension).
- Legal and Regulatory Compliance – business and corporate activity is regulated; disputes, litigation or breach of law can all be show stoppers. Proactive compliance is recommended.
- Assets and Knowledge Management – for organisational coherence and portfolio valuation it is vital to know what you have, what it is worth in different contexts, and how to manage the assets into the future. For example, if the key assets are a set of signed contracts – understand them and evaluate them so as to use them strategically.
Contact us with any questions or requests.
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