Not sure where to start with structure, IP, your first raise, or bringing on an investor? We do. Let us help you lawnch it properly.
Most startup legal problems are cheap to prevent and brutally expensive to fix. The wrong company structure costs you at exit. IP sitting in a founder’s personal name kills a raise. A co-founder with no vesting and no Shareholders’ Agreement walks away with a third of the company. We have watched all three happen, and none of them had to.
Ready to Lawnch? Get in touch for your Free Consultation.
Tammi founded Lawnch after 18 years in law and four years building and running two businesses of her own. That is the difference in the room. We are not translating a startup problem into legal language. We have had the problem, at 11 pm, with a payroll to make.
Most firms that call themselves startup lawyers stop being useful somewhere around the seed round. The work changes after that, and so does the risk.
At the scale-up stage, the questions are different. Your second-round investor wants protections that your first-round investor never asked for. You have a board now, and it needs papers it can actually rely on. Key staff are asking about equity and the answer has tax consequences. The contracts you signed at ten customers do not work at two hundred. Somebody has approached you about acquiring the business and you have no idea whether your house is in order.
We do that half of the work too, which is the half that decides what the company is eventually worth.
Company, trust, holding company, or a structure that lets you take the R&D offset and still sell cleanly in five years. We choose based on where you are going, not where you are, because restructuring later is a taxable event and nobody enjoys it.
If a founder built the prototype before the company existed, or a contractor wrote the code without an IP assignment, your company does not own its most valuable asset. Investors find this in diligence. We find it first, and assign it across.
Vesting, leaver provisions, decision-making, and what happens when one of you wants out in year two. Sort this while everyone is still friends. It is the single highest-return hour of legal work a startup ever buys.
Convertible notes, SAFEs, priced rounds, term sheets and the compliance rules about who you are legally allowed to approach. We will also tell you when you should not be raising yet.
Employee share schemes and option plans that keep your key people, structured to use the startup tax concessions properly rather than handing your team a tax bill they cannot pay.
Customer terms, supplier agreements, contractor agreements and employment contracts. Written once, properly, so you are not renegotiating every deal individually at 40 customers.
We are registered tax agents with a dedicated R&D and grants practice. The R&D Tax Incentive can return up to 43.5c in every dollar you spend building your product, and that is money you do not have to sell equity to get. Very few startup law firms can do this. We can.
The Gold Coast startup and scale-up scene does not need Sydney pricing or Sydney response times. Lawnch works with founders from Burleigh Heads to Southport and across Queensland, at the ideation stage and at Series A.
We work the way you work. Fast, direct, and with a bias toward doing the thing rather than producing a memo about the thing.
Request Your Free Consultation– You find out about the problem when it is already a problem
– The answer arrives four days after the deal needed it
– Advice comes as a list of considerations, not a decision
– You sign a document nobody walked you through
– The agreement does not survive its first real test
– The bill arrives with no relationship to the scope discussed
– Your lawyer knows the law but not your business
A startup lawyer sets up the company structure, secures IP ownership, papers the founder arrangements, runs capital raises and builds employee equity plans. The good ones also tell you what you do not need yet, because early stage legal spend is best concentrated on the handful of things that are expensive to fix later.
Start with the company structure, an IP assignment from every founder and contractor, a Shareholders’ Agreement with vesting, and customer terms. Almost everything else can wait until there is a reason for it, and a lawyer who sells you the full suite on day one is selling, not advising.
We quote on scope rather than running an open meter, and your first consultation is free. Foundational work such as structuring and founder agreements is usually a fixed fee, and we will tell you honestly when something can wait until you have revenue.
Before there is any disagreement, which in practice means as soon as there is more than one shareholder. Vesting in particular has to be agreed while everyone is optimistic, because asking a co-founder to accept vesting after a falling out is a conversation that does not go well.
If you are an Australian company undertaking eligible experimental work and spending at least $20,000 a year on it, very likely yes. Software development frequently qualifies, and the offset is refundable for companies under the turnover threshold, meaning it can arrive as cash even while you are pre-revenue. Lawnch is a registered tax agent and can assess eligibility and lodge the claim.
By default the contractor often does, unless your agreement contains an express IP assignment, and this is one of the most common problems we find in startup diligence. It is fixable, but it is far cheaper to fix now than during a raise when the investor’s lawyer has found it.
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