General Counsel Services
What kind of clients use our services?
- You are running a private equity backed business. The investors expect to exit on a usual PE exit cycle and want to know you will be ready for sale. They also expect you to manage an aggressive series of acquisitions, integrate them and deliver the EBITDA. There is always pressure on internal headcount and you have no budget for internal legal – what you need is sales people!
- You are running a business that is the result of a series of acquisitions and diversification of business strategy. You want to re-organise, streamline it legally and divest or sell bits or all of it but you are worried about what a data room might look like without significant effort.
- You’re an entrepreneur in the financial services or technology sector. Your business is taking off, and you have a lot of balls in the air – you simply don’t have enough time for being a part-time legal department, for instructing external lawyers or making sure that everything has been signed and filed, but you don’t need (or want) a full time legal function. Having said that you are worried about what might being missed and what the business will look like if and when you want to sell it.
- Your business has been getting along with a one-person legal team, and that person just gave notice. While you have an external law firm, you are quite worried about hourly rates and the fact that they can’t help you manage legal risk internally. You also want to scale the business and don’t want to be in this position again, plus you worry that you need a diversity of skill sets in your legal function.
How do they use the services?
Get ready for buyers / investors
We start with a deep dive into the business. We imagine it is for sale and we diligence it (for a fixed fee). We provide a report and gap analysis on the legal state of the business.
Along the way we start helping you implement technology that will help get contracts signed, store your know how and manage your company structure not to mention a living, evolving data room.
Keep up the momentum
Then we start to close the gaps. Contracts get signed, technology gets recommended and implemented. Systems get created. Legal and operational risk gets reduced. This work is done on a banded cost system – clients get fixed pricing and a team with a blended skill set. “Unknown Unknows” turn into “Known Unknowns” and then into “Known Knows”.
Contract administration
Organisations enter into numerous contracts that need to be managed, both for their business and as part of their offering. Our services are designed to help organisations manage those contracts across their entire lifecycle and implement technology that helps get those contracts signed.
We will review your contracts to establish frameworks and plans for ongoing monitoring, particularly where those contracts are high value or high risk. We will prepare an easily accessible database of all your contracts and identify all relevant milestones and deadlines in relation to the obligations of our clients and the counterparties.
Data protection
It is important that each business protects the personal data that it collects, and that data must be handled in line with current legislation, potentially across a number of jurisdictions. Larger organisations typically have a data protection team, and we are able to support them on both ad hoc and large-scale projects. For smaller organisations, we are able to train your staff to put policies in place for data protection compliance meaning that you only pay for what you need, and you benefit from our extensive experience and resources.
The law requires organisations to demonstrate their compliance, and we can provide you with an annual audit of your procedures, controls, policies and general data protection strategy. If we identify any gaps, we can help you resolve them.
Compliance and risk management
Compliance can be a stumbling block. Even if you have a well-established in-house compliance team, there will be requirements or projects that require additional resources or expertise.
We can assist with the creation of policies and processes, as well as the design and delivery of training programmes. We can also provide you with peace of mind by conducting comprehensive compliance monitoring to ensure that you are meeting your regulatory obligations.
IP Advisory
We provide up to date advice across a wide range of issues involving an organisation’s intellectual property. Our management, strategy and registration services enable businesses to get more from their intellectual property. We help both the owners and licensees of intellectual property to protect and maintain what is often their most valuable asset.
Go to market
Support for investment acquisitions and sales. Due diligence teams, data rooms and decks. We have seen and done them all and help our clients across the line.
Why the Truva solution? Why go “fractional”?
Rapidly growing businesses get access to the experience and legal knowledge of a team of seasoned general counsel at a cost they can afford. Bigger clients also benefit from the Truva experience-set gained across multiple clients and different industries and benefit from innovation and growth happening in other clients.
After a deep dive and closing down gaps the Truva team has become intimately familiar with the company, the management, and the employees by working directly with them as colleagues. Attorneys and law firms who work for the company on specific projects or only when a legal problem arises do not have the intimate knowledge of the company and its management. This builds a truly trusted relationship between the clients and the Truva team and aligns everyone to the same goals.