Legal Audit

Businesses accumulate legal obligations the way they accumulate software: gradually, through decisions that made sense individually, until nobody holds the whole picture. Contracts are signed by different people in different years, terms are updated on a website but not in the templates, a policy exists but nobody follows it. None of this causes a problem until an investor, an auditor or a claimant asks a question that requires the whole picture at once.

A legal audit produces that picture before someone else demands it. It is a structured review rather than a search for fault, and it typically covers:

• an inventory of the contracts the business actually runs on, and which are missing;
• the obligations hidden in them — notice periods, exclusivity, change-of-control triggers;
• the gap between the terms you publish and the terms you use;
• corporate housekeeping: authorities to sign, minutes, registers and filings;
• employment documentation and the arrangements that were changed informally;
• data protection: what is held, on what basis, and what should have been deleted;
• intellectual property, and whether the business owns what it believes it owns;
• insurance cover measured against the risks the business actually carries;
• a prioritised list of what to fix, in the order the exposure justifies.

Our lawyers can support you with this.