DLA Piper launches Startup Pack 2.0 for early stage and high growth enterprises

DLA Piper’s Emerging Growth and Venture Capital Team has launched a Startup Pack for early stage startups and high growth enterprises looking to establish their business on a more formal basis in England, Wales and Ireland.

The pack has been compiled with input from lawyers across the firm with experience in corporate, intellectual property and commercial contracting, data protection, employment, employment benefit and tax matters. Its aim is to assist start-up companies in understanding some of the key legal issues that are likely to be relevant to them at the early stage in their development and to help them create the right legal framework that will ensure that they are protected at the outset at what is a critical time for their future success. The pack is particularly suited to companies looking to raise external capital for the first time, either from family, friends, angel or seed-level investors.

As one of the world’s largest law firms, the pack draws from DLA Piper’s significant experience in advising companies at all stages in the corporate life cycle and also reflects feedback from company founders, incubators, accelerators, venture capitalists and other stakeholders.

This Startup Pack contains the key legal documents that an early stage start-up will need and includes, amongst other things:

• a step by step guide to setting up a company;
• articles of association (England and Wales)/constitution (Ireland);
• a subscription and shareholders' agreement;
• an intellectual property assignment agreement;
• a non-disclosure agreement;
• a standard employment contract;
• an intellectual property checklist;
• a tax checklist; and
• a checklist of additional employment considerations.

The editors of the Startup Pack, Philip Allenby and Dylan Kennett, both senior associates at DLA Piper, said: “This pack provides an invaluable and free source of information and practical advice to companies that are at both at an exciting, yet critical, stage of their development. Drawing upon DLA Piper’s extensive experience of advising companies at all stages of their life cycle, startup companies about to embark on the next stage of their development will have the ability to put in place solid foundations on which to build and flourish, safe in the knowledge that they have the right legal frameworks in place.”

Download a copy of the Startup Pack here.^*1