Outsourced Legal Solutions

A Commercial Legal Audit is an effective way for your company to review certain key contracts and its Commercial and Consumer Law Practices.

What are the benefits of a Commercial Legal Audit?

Cost savings
Reviewing terms of your key contracts and reviewing or streamlining certain policies can lead to cost savings. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Improve business
Identifying legal blind spots and implementing workarounds leads to smart working.

Reduce Risk
By identifying legal risk in a business, actions can be implemented to reduce exposure to financial risk such as fines for non-compliance, damages for breaches or damages from claimants.

We work with clients to understand their data flows and how they use data. This enables us to provide a compliance report.

An audit can be done on-site or remotely. We will assess current data compliance and recommend steps toward compliance with Data Protection laws. This is undertaken through a tailored audit or questionnaire, which will remain confidential to your business. The audit will ensure that you have a detailed understanding of whether your business is meeting legal requirements and ensure that you have a clear understanding of what your business needs to do to achieve and maintain compliance.

The benefits of the audit to your business include the following:

• Compliance Assurance with relevant laws and regulations.
• Enhanced Security as you can identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in data management practices.
• Reputation Protection by demonstrating commitment to data protection and compliance, providing a competitive edge.

What is an IP audit?
An IP audit is a tool for reviewing the IP owned or used by your business.

A comprehensive audit will include:

• Identifying the IP assets held by a business.
• Searches of the IPO register to determine whether your trademarks and design rights are registered.
• Reviewing the IP provisions in key commercial contracts and licences.
• Reporting on the IP held by your business.

Why carry out an IP audit?

1. Identify potential gaps in IP protection.
2. Identifying cost savings.
3. Identifying the risks.

Having gone to the effort and expense of registering your IP, you should ensure your IP is protected going forward by watching for situations where third parties seek to register IP which is similar or identical to yours.

Many businesses do not have the time to monitor for third party IP registration applications which might affect or damage their brand. A simple solution is for Herrington Carmichael to carry out an IP monitoring service on your behalf in order to assist your business to protect its IP from potential infringements.

This can include watching out for trade mark applications which are similar to your own IP. As a general rule, it is quicker, less complex and less expensive to take action against a third-party application at an early stage. Our IP monitoring services therefore provide you with the opportunity to take action against third parties before they have the opportunity to register their IP.

We also proactively offer commercial and pragmatic solutions in respect of other parties who may be infringing your IP or whose activities may be causing confusion with your own branding.

A Commercial Contract Review is an effective way for your business to review commercial contracts quickly and cost-effectively based on a limited review of only the most fundamental provisions.

What are the benefits of a Commercial Contract Review?

• By reviewing specific terms of your key contracts, costs can be reduced. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
• By identifying legal blind spots and implementing workarounds can lead to smart working
• By identifying legal risk in a business, actions can be implemented to reduce exposure to financial risk such as fines for non-compliance, damages for breach of contract or damages from claimants

What's included in the Commercial Contract review?
Reviewing the contract and preparing a high-level report in relation to the key legal risks associated with the contents and omissions of the contract. It is a high-level review rather than a full review, focussing on key issues rather than providing a full contract commentary.

A few examples of clauses we would review would be:

• Term
• Limits of liability
• Confidential Information definition
• Confidential information not covered
• Change of control
• Governing law
• Jurisdiction

All reviews will be done from a commercial law perspective and all advice is from an English law perspective only. If a contract is governed by foreign law, then local advice is recommended.

UK employers who are registered sponsors or applying for registration under the Skilled Worker Sponsor Licence application can expect, during the course of the licence or application, to receive a visit from a compliance officer of the sponsor licensing team.

To prevent Home Office scrutiny and penalties we can offer the following:

• To ensure that the processes and human resource systems and practices in place to enable you to meet your sponsorship duties
• To ensure compliance with an employer's legal responsibilities towards the prevention of illegal working and any other relevant legislation

Full compliance will secure an 'A' rating licence from the sponsor team. Non-compliance could lead to the loss of your licence, failure to grant and/or fine.

Immigration Audit help?
We understand the complexity of the UK immigration processes, the legal requirements and the issues arising from compliance visits. Our audit services are tailored to meet your business needs and budget whilst ensuring you avoid the potential of incurring penalties or even prosecution. We can apply an appropriately scaled audit to meet your business needs.