Start-ups log: Crash Course in Legal, Widsen

Last Wednesday 21st of April Mårten Janson from Fondia gave the bootcampers a good crash course in legal issues. It was interesting to get a good insight from an experienced lawyer on what to take into account when creating a company. There seems to be a legal perspective on pretty much everything and you can avoid many pitfalls by being well prepared.

One of the most important advices was that you should never ever google for your legal advice or use your friends’ templates. Always seek for professional help in these issues and have a real lawyer check your legal documents. Even though this point was given by a lawyer, it really is a valid one. All the technical details concerning legal documents and what you should take into account can be easily overwhelming. A professional lawyer can fairly quickly put you on the right track. However most of the documents concerning founding a company and taking the first steps can be found from trustworthy websites, such as the National Board of Patents and Registration in Finland and other official institutes.

A large part of the presentation concerned one of the most important documents in a startup, the shareholders’ agreement. Here again it was advised to seek for professional help, because it is perhaps the most complex agreement a startup can stumble on during their first steps. Ideally the agreement should also cover all the possible cases, when the shareholders do not agree or when things do not go on as planned.

The presentation also covered some issues concerning hiring more workforce and what to take into account on these cases. We also discussed about issues related to getting additional funding and what that can mean in legal terms.

All of this seemed to indicate that it really is vital to have at least a contact to a lawyer to advice when to need a lawyer, the Finnish law seems in many senses complex and there definitely are several things to take into account. Luckily there are many places where you can find these advices, like the chamber of commerce that provide legal counseling for their membership fee. Also there seem to be several law offices that have affordable prices for startup companies.

In the end, it is expensive to use a lawyer but it is much more expensive not to use a lawyer when things go wrong.

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