IT business legal support
We will take on the paper a software business runs on: the agreements you sign with customers and suppliers, and the ones that decide who owns the product you sell.
When an IT business needs legal support
Your customer sent their own contract
The paper arrived from their side and it was written for them. What you sign decides what you owe on the day a release slips.
Contractors wrote part of the product
People outside the company built pieces of what you sell. Whether the rights reached you at all depends on what their agreements said at the time.
A reseller wants your product
Someone wants to sell your software under their own name. Territory, exclusivity and what happens when it ends are the substance of that deal.
Your paper says two different things
The customer agreement promises one thing and the product’s own terms another. A reader in a dispute takes whichever version helps them.
Every deal is negotiated from scratch
There is no standard paper, so each sale is a fresh negotiation. The same concessions get made again because the line was never written down.
Someone asked for your rights chain
A buyer or a large customer wants proof that you own what you sell. That proof is the set of agreements you signed years ago.
What legal support for an IT business covers
A software business stands on two stacks of paper: what it signs with customers and suppliers, and what its own people and contractors signed so that the rights arrived. When the two stacks disagree, it surfaces at a renewal, an audit or a sale.
The documents your product ships with — the licence, the terms and the privacy policy — are a set of their own, covered by the product document package. Getting one product to launch is a project with an end. How ongoing help is bought and queued is a legal retainer. This page is the standing work in between.
What you get
- Your own contract templates
- Incoming paper read before signing
- A clear view of where the chain of rights gives way
- One position across every document
- A line your team can hold
The agreements we run
- Customer agreements: what is delivered, when it counts as accepted, and what a failure costs each side.
- Supplier and contractor agreements, written so that the rights in what they build arrive together with the work.
- Reseller and partner arrangements: territory, exclusivity, freedom on price and what survives the ending.
- Development and licence agreements, where the line between what you keep and what you grant is the whole document.
- Confidentiality and data-handling terms, matched to what the product does rather than to what the template assumed.
Where a rights chain breaks
- A contractor signed nothing, or signed a template that assigns nothing.
- Someone built part of it before joining, and their agreement starts on the joining date.
- A licence was granted more widely than intended, and it only shows on the second deal.
- The rights sit in one company while a different one signs the contracts.
Formats of work
One agreement at a time
You send the paper that arrived, and we will read it, mark what each clause costs you and hand back the version to send.
Your own paper, built once
We will build the set your team signs from — customer, contractor and reseller — together with a note on where a template stops and a lawyer starts.
Standing cover for the team
Your people bring agreements as they arrive, and every answer is written down so the next person asking can find it.
Tracing the rights
We will trace what you own back through the agreements that produced it and name what each break needs in order to close. Closing a break is separate work we agree on: whether it closes depends on finding the person who holds the right and on their willingness to sign.
Sources: a widely used set of principles for international commercial contracts applies when the parties have agreed that it governs their contract. Under it, where both sides send their own standard terms and agree on everything else, the contract is made on the agreed terms plus the standard terms that are common in substance, unless a party says promptly that it will not be bound.
Stages of work
Reading what you already signed — 1 week.
We start from the agreements in force: customers, contractors, resellers and whatever the team has been sending out without review.
Finding where the rights actually sit.
We will follow the product back through the people and companies that built it, and mark each point where an assignment is missing or arrived late.
The gap is worth knowing before a buyer finds it, because repairing it needs the co-operation of whoever holds the right.
Building the paper your team signs from.
You get the templates and the rule for using them: which fields may be changed by the team, and which changes have to come back to us.
Negotiating what comes in.
Incoming paper gets read against that line, and you see what each concession costs before you decide to make it.
Where both sides insist on their own standard terms, what binds is a question in its own right, and it is settled before signature.
Keeping the set in step with the product.
A new market, a new payment flow or a new integration changes what the agreements have to say, and the set is updated when the product moves.
Handing it over whenever you want.
You get the templates, the reasoning and the record of what was agreed, and your own people carry the work on inside the line the set draws between what a template settles and what needs a lawyer.
What else we do around ongoing legal work is in the Advisory & Ongoing Support area.
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