Your challenges
Universities and higher education institutions commonly get involved with corporate and commercial matters from setting up subsidiaries, entering into commercial joint ventures with other institutions and private sector businesses both at home and abroad, establishing spin outs to commercialise technology through to acquiring other businesses and merging with other institutions.
Achieving your ambitions
Whatever your corporate or commercial requirements, we can help. Our team can help you set up trading subsidiaries and not for profit entities, advise you on funding subsidiaries taking into account your position as charities and help you deal with all aspects of your commercial collaborations whether using contracts, companies, limited liability partnerships, limited partnerships or other entities to ensure the collaborations are structured to ensure you achieve your commercial objectives whilst protecting your business interests, reputation and intellectual property rights.
Our team has extensive experience in commercialising technology from acting for university technology transfer offices, investors and the spin outs themselves. This year despite very difficult conditions for early stage technology companies to raise finance we handled more than 35 funding deals with an aggregate of over £40 million. We have also assisted university clients with acquiring and selling businesses and in acting for clients on merger discussions with other institutions.
The strength you need
Acting for the higher education sector has been a core business for us for many years. You will have access to our large corporate and commercial team of which six partners and over 12 lawyers focus on work for higher education institutions. We form part of the firm’s wider University Business Group comprising lawyers from other disciplines who specialise in advising education institutions.
Lawyers you can trust
Our work for our clients is highly rated across the UK. Legal 500 says that our “value for money is fantastic, especially compared to London-based firms; the quality of their work is at least on a par and often more commercially aware” while Chambers says that our corporate team “wins abundant praise for its extremely high quality work, high levels of responsiveness and excellent vision”.