Just how suitable are off-the-shelf legal documents?

You achieve your business objectives through your commercial agreements. If you want high quality outcomes, make sure you use high quality documents.

Most “standard” legal documents will not achieve their intended outcome. Why? Because:

A large component of legal advice deals with selecting the correct document in the first place. If you start with the wrong “standard” document you will not achieve your desired result – no matter how well drafted the document. For example, a Non-Disclosure Agreement is not an appropriate document to protect your company’s intellectual property from former employees.
Most “standard” documents were written before the majority of current tax, investment, corporate, commercial, insolvency and family laws were passed. The changes that have occurred in tax, corporate, insolvency and family law in the past 5 years is unprecedented – and affects almost all legal documentation.
Most “standard” documents are not well written. They have not been written with the subtleties of various tax and investment laws in mind. For example, most standard Buy-Sell Deeds trigger a CGT liability when they are first signed, as opposed to when the Exit Event is triggered. Most Partnership Agreements do not take into account the fact that tax laws treat partnership CGT asset differently to other assets. Most standard loan agreements do not properly deal with offsets and the preservation of security.

When implementing our advice we employ our technical skills to provide a document tailored to your circumstance and priorities.

Please call us on 1300 654 590 or email us to discuss how we can assist.

The information contained in this post is current at the date of editing – 24 November 2023

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