Jurisdiction selection
We will work out which country your business can actually be run from: which constraints are hard, which only look hard, and what the choice will cost you every year after it is made.
Award enforcement
Признание решений
172 parties
172 участника
Model law reach
Типовой закон
93 States
93 государства
When you need help choosing a jurisdiction
The shortlist came from a forum thread
Someone published a ranking and it became your plan. Rankings answer a question nobody asked about your business.
A payment provider said no
The company was set up and then the money could not move. Who will hold your funds is part of the choice, not a step after it.
An investor wants a familiar shape
Funds finance forms they have financed before. An unusual choice turns a term sheet into a legal opinion and a delay.
Your team sits elsewhere
People, decisions and customers can sit in three different places. Each of them pulls the answer in a direction of its own.
You will have to enforce something
Contracts hold until they do not. Where a judgment or an award can actually be used is a question to answer before the signature.
The yearly bill was a surprise
Setting a company up is one payment. Keeping it is a standing one, and it is the number that decides whether the choice survives.
What choosing a jurisdiction covers
There is no country that is best. There is a set of constraints, some of them hard and some only inherited from an article, and the work is to find which of them actually bind your business, and to write down why the rest do not.
Once the country is settled, putting the company on a register is company registration; where several companies have to be linked to each other afterwards, that is group structuring.
What you get
- A shortlist with the reason for each
- The constraints that actually bind
- The yearly cost of keeping it
- The enforcement question answered
- A written record of the reasoning
What actually decides it
- Who your customers are and where they pay from, because that reaches your business through their rules and not only through yours.
- Whether a bank, a payment provider and a store will accept the form you are choosing, which is answered before incorporation or not at all.
- Where the people and the decisions really sit, because a status granted on substance is later checked against it.
- What has to be filed, audited, renewed and paid each year, and who inside your company will actually do it.
- Where a judgment or an award would have to be enforced, and whether the place holding the assets recognises it.
What the choice does not decide
Registering in a country does not move your customers into it. Rules that follow the buyer — consumer protection, data, licensing of the activity — keep reaching you at the address of the person who pays. Nor does the choice settle where people are employed: that follows where they work.
Formats of work
One decision, once
You have two or three candidates and need the comparison written down, with the constraint that decides each one named.
The whole map
Where the business is being built from nothing, we go from customers and money back to the country, and the answer arrives with the yearly cost attached.
A second opinion
A choice has already been made and you want it tested against the constraints before the money is spent on implementing it.
The choice, revisited
A new market, a new investor or a new product changes what binds, and the earlier answer is re-run against the new facts.
Sources: the convention on recognising and enforcing foreign arbitral awards has 172 parties; legislation based on or influenced by the model law on international commercial arbitration has been adopted in 93 States in a total of 127 jurisdictions. A model law is not law by itself: it takes effect only through what each State enacted.
Stages of work
What the business has to be able to do — 1 week.
The first questions are the plainest: who pays you, in what, from where, and what you sell them. Most of the shortlist disappears here, before anyone has compared a tax rate.
The constraints that are hard.
Licensing of the activity, ownership limits, the acceptance of banks and platforms, and where your people actually are. A constraint is hard when breaking it stops the business instead of merely costing it.
The yearly weight of each candidate.
Filings, audits, renewals, a registered address, the people who have to be there. You get the standing cost beside the setup cost, because they are rarely in proportion.
The enforcement question.
Where a dispute would be decided and where the decision would have to be used. A choice that wins on paper and loses at enforcement is a choice we mark.
The comparison, written down.
Each candidate gets the same questions and the same answers in the same order, so the reasoning survives the person who made it.
The decision, and what happens next.
The chosen route arrives with its first steps, its first-year calendar and the list of what would make us revisit it.
Our other work under a standing arrangement sits in Advisory & Ongoing Support.
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we’ll help you with it in any jurisdiction.