practice areas
TRADE & IndustrY
In a legal environment where standards are increasingly numerous and restrictive, you must manage the commercial risks inherent in your activity. To achieve this, you must secure your relationships with your clients and suppliers. It is therefore necessary to adapt these contractual relationships to the specificities of your sector, but also to your own operating methods. Not only do you need reliable and rapid legal responses, but these must be tailored to the context in which you operate.
Our team offers you customized assistance in all areas of general business law.
We assist you in the implementation of your commercial strategies in a secure manner, in particular for the transfer or reorganization of your tangible and intangible assets (assistance in the negotiation of the purchase/sale of businesses and the drafting of deeds). We can also assist you in controlling and securing your subcontracts, or in drawing up your contracts for sale or purchase, whether remote, off-site or in situ. We can also assist and advise you in the management of conflicts that may arise with your suppliers, customers or competitors (transaction, mediation, proceedings).
Our customs practice includes advising and assisting trading companies from the incorporation phase through to obtaining a license number from the Directorate General of Customs and Excise, customs companies in the exercise of their mandate vis-à-vis their clients, and our own clients in obtaining exemptions for materials, goods and equipment benefiting from a preferential customs regime. We also advise and assist our clients in the procedure for obtaining customs concessions for warehouses.
Our lawyers have developed a recognised expertise in corporate law since the firm was founded, both in advisory and litigation activities. Our expert team handles the technical aspects of company law, enabling us to assist entrepreneurs in their business creation projects.
We provide a clear vision of the legal form best suited to our client’s project.
The corporate law team assists companies at all stages of their development:
Creation of companies
Legal strategy; choice of legal status and determination of the governance method; drafting of the company’s articles of association; merger/acquisition and capital opening operations
Acquisitions
Legal audit of the target company, assistance in the various phases of negotiation, creation of the legal structure for the takeover, completion of formalities, drafting of the tradi-off and the final deed, engineering, negotiation and implementation of complex spin-off operations, mergers, partial contributions of assets, choice of terms and conditions, negotiation of conditions, drafting of deeds relating to the opening up of capital (memoranda of understanding, partners’ agreement, articles of association, financing agreements), approval of accounts and legal monitoring of the companies.
Assistance in carrying out the formalities for organising the general meeting: sending out invitations, making available the annual accounts and the management report, and, where applicable, the auditor’s report, participation of the lawyer in the meeting and organisation of the proceedings, drafting of the minutes of the general meeting, filing of the annual accounts with the registry, keeping of the legal records…
As true legal partners, our lawyers make this obligation a moment of strategic exchange between the company’s partners.
Transfer of the company
Advice on the implementation of a prior restructuring: holding company, separation of activities…
Choice of legal structure: separation of activities, conversion of the company…
Assistance in negotiating financial and legal conditions.
Negotiation and drafting of the sale agreement and the asset/liability guarantee agreement.
Managing relationships between partners
Drafting a partnership agreement.
Assistance in resolving conflicts between partners.
Support for companies in trouble
Our lawyers advise on liquidation, dissolution and reorganization proceedings…
The technique of security law requires the use of experts with proven skills on whom professionals need to be able to rely.
Our team of lawyers dedicated to security law conveys these requirements and assists you in the implementation and securing of your projects.
We advise and assist our clients (credit institutions) in the establishment and realization of securities for the granting of loans. This includes pledges, assumptions, irrevocable direct debits and drafts (bills of exchange, promissory notes, protests). We are also involved in debt collection.
We also advise and assist our clients in setting up securities for mining projects in the DRC (mining mortgages, pledges of shares of mining companies receiving financing; pledging of mining products). Lastly, we advise and assist our clients in setting up land and property mortgages to cover the financing of real estate projects.
Faced with global competition based on digital technology, the race for strategies to preserve their intangible and intellectual assets is becoming the main concern of companies.
Our intellectual property specialists work to develop the best solutions for data protection, as well as to enrich the intellectual assets of client companies.
We regularly undertake the processes necessary to safeguard or defend trademarks, designs, models and patents, copyrights, domain names, etc.
Our experts assist companies in drafting and negotiating all contracts related to the operation, existence and ownership of industrial property titles, the management of portfolios of trademarks, designs, patents and domain names (prior art searches, filing and monitoring), the protection and development of copyrights and related rights. We also offer and handle judicial and administrative proceedings, seizure proceedings, infringement and/or invalidation of patents, compensation for the consequences of a ban on the use of a patented product, claim actions, etc.
Over the past ten years, we have built up a team of high-level specialists dedicated to tax law.
We assist and advise companies and individuals on all aspects of tax law, in particular during tax audits, from the preliminary phase through to the audit.
We exchange with the tax authorities, sending them requests for information, clarification or justification.
We negotiate with the tax authorities in order to obtain payment deadlines. We manage and succeed in appealing against the amount of taxation to the tax authorities. In case of litigation, we represent the interests of our clients before the administrative and judicial courts.
Our dedicated and experienced labour and employment lawyers offer quality support based on proximity. This enables company directors to manage relations with their employees efficiently, both with regard to all the legal issues related to the employment contract, taking into account the legal and contractual environment, the development of case law, the constraints of the activity, the company’s strategy, its challenges and its social policy, as well as in the continuation or termination of the contract.
As the payroll is one of the essential parts of a company’s profit and loss account, our lawyers advise clients on the application of social security legislation, as well as in the event of an inspection by social security bodies.
For the proper execution of the employment contract, we provide upstream advice on work-related or commuting accidents, sick leave, dismissal, resignation, management of restructuring and workforce reduction plans (forward-looking management of jobs, economic redundancies, employment protection plans, voluntary departure plans, management of collective conflicts, etc.).
In addition, our team assists managers in litigation and regularly appears before relevant authorities (in particular the Labour Inspectorate in the phase of prior conciliation, collective redundancies for economic reasons, etc.), as well as before the courts to defend their interests in the context of litigation, whether individual or collective. We also assist companies employing foreign workers in obtaining work permits from the relevant authorities.