Practice
Investment structuring and transaction documents
This practice drafts and reviews the documents that govern a private investment before money changes hands, including subscription agreements, shareholder agreements, side letters, redemption clauses, and drag-along or tag-along rights. It applies before a client commits capital or agrees to a change in terms. The paid first assessment names the clauses that create refusal risk later and the procedural track that would apply if those clauses were ever tested.
When this practice applies
A client comes to this practice before signing, or after a counterparty has proposed a change: a delayed closing, a new class of shares, a side letter that was not in the original term sheet. The same documents that look routine at signing are the ones read line by line once a payment stops or a redemption is refused. Clients who have already faced a refusal, described across how refusal types are classified by asset class, often trace the dispute back to a clause nobody negotiated at the time. A related pattern is set out in the scenario on what happens after payment terms are changed unilaterally.
What the paid first assessment produces
The paid first assessment produces a written note on the draft or existing documents. It states which clauses are standard, which shift risk to one side without saying so, and which depend on a jurisdiction's procedure that has not yet been checked. It also flags where a related compliance question sits, covered separately under investor compliance review. Legal fees for the structuring work itself are not published, because scope varies by document count and jurisdiction. The price of this first assessment is fixed and quoted before any document is opened.
How the work is scoped
Scope depends on how many documents are in play, how many jurisdictions the parties and the underlying asset sit in, and whether a counterparty has already signed a version the client cannot renegotiate. A single subscription agreement is a narrower task than a shareholder agreement tied to a cap table across several entities. The full list of practice areas shows where structuring work connects to compliance review and to dispute practices. Before instructing any firm on documents of this size, a client can check how to verify the firm handling them, set out at how to verify a law firm.
Where this practice hands over
If a document already in force is the subject of a live dispute, non-payment, refusal to redeem, or a frozen withdrawal, the matter moves to the refusal and enforcement practices rather than staying in structuring. A judgment or award arising from that dispute is a separate stage, covered under enforcement of judgments and awards. The composite scenario on non-payment on a private debt where the debtor is in the UAE shows how a gap left in structuring surfaces once a dispute starts.
What we do not take on
This practice does not draft documents meant to obscure who bears default risk, and it does not act as escrow or paying agent for the funds it structures. It does not negotiate directly with a counterparty on a client's behalf during structuring, and it does not promise that a clause will hold up before the jurisdiction that would apply has been checked. Before signing anything under time pressure, the points in the checklist before signing a settlement in a non-payment matter apply equally to a first-time investment. The firm takes no fee contingent on the outcome of a matter, and its registration can be checked in the public registry linked in the footer.