Practice
Shareholder and stake disputes
This practice applies when a stake in a company has been diluted, a promised buyout has not happened, or a court decision confirming your shareholding sits unenforced. It covers non-payment on shares, a blocked withdrawal of a stake, and refusal to honour a shareholder agreement. The paid first assessment reads the corporate record against what you were told and states, in writing, what is provable now.
When this practice applies
Clients usually arrive after a board resolution or a new share issuance has cut their percentage without proper notice or consent. Others hold a stake blocked from payout by a co-investor who controls the register. Some already have a judgment recognising their shareholding, and enforcement of it has stalled. Where the stake sits inside a fund structure, the mechanics change. Redemption there is often governed by contract terms and points allocation rather than company law, a distinction covered in how fund structures route redemption disputes to contract and arbitration. Where several investors were diluted or refused payout by the same counterparty, the claims often need to be sequenced rather than filed separately, discussed in how one refusal can affect several investors at once.
What the paid first assessment produces
The paid first assessment produces a written read of the corporate documents you hold: articles, shareholder agreement, share register extracts, board minutes, and correspondence about the dilution or refusal. It states which parts of the claim the documents currently support, what is missing, and what a public register search would need to confirm before any filing. It does not forecast the outcome. Numerical result figures are not part of what is delivered. Fees for the legal work itself are not published here. Before instructing anyone in this space, how to check the firm making these claims is set out in how to verify a law firm before instructing one.
How the work is scoped
The size of the work depends on how many parties hold competing claims to the same stake, how many jurisdictions the company, the register, and the counterparty sit in, and how complete the paper trail is. A single dilution by one board resolution is a narrower task than a stake spread across a holding structure with nominee shareholders. Where assets tied to the disputed stake need to be located or traced before a claim is filed, that work sits with asset tracing and security work, run alongside this practice rather than folded into it. Where a counterparty has invoked delay or non-performance as force majeure, the applicable test is contract-specific, addressed in how force majeure clauses are tested against a refusal to redeem. The scope is set after the first assessment, not before it.
Where this practice hands over
Once the assessment identifies a provable claim, the file moves to formal proceedings, whether litigation, arbitration, or a formal demand, depending on what the shareholder agreement or articles specify. If a decision is already in hand and the obstacle is getting it satisfied, the file moves to enforcement against the counterparty's assets. Where the underlying problem is a different type of refusal, such as a frozen withdrawal or a failed redemption with no stake involved, the relevant starting point is the refusal types this firm works on.
What we do not take on
This practice does not represent clients in criminal complaints against a counterparty, does not act as a corporate manager or interim director, and does not take on a dispute where no documentary record of the shareholding exists at all. It does not promise to freeze, reverse, or unwind a transaction; whether an interim measure is available depends on the facts of the case. Other refusal types, such as a frozen withdrawal or a failed redemption with no stake involved, sit under the full list of services this firm covers. There is no fee that depends solely on the outcome, and the entity behind this practice appears in the public register linked from this site's footer.