Written for the person who has to decide.
No client alerts, no case digests. The maths behind a decision, and what we would do about it.
Opening a UK entity from the Gulf: first decisions
Incorporation is the easy part. The decisions that cost a Gulf founder money are taken in the first fortnight, mostly before anybody recognises them as decisions.
The liability cap you agreed at pilot scale
The number that looked generous on a trial is the number that decides the worst day at volume. Reading the cap, the carve-outs and the insurance together is what changes the answer.
Late payment: what you can actually charge
On a commercial debt the law already gives you interest and a fixed sum towards recovery costs, whether or not your contract mentions them. Almost nobody claims either, which is why late payment costs your customer nothing.
Who owns the work your freelancers made?
You paid the invoice, so you assume you own the logo, the code and the photographs. The default rule says otherwise, and the gap usually surfaces at the worst possible moment: due diligence.
Do UK restrictive covenants work in the UAE?
A covenant drafted for an English contract and pasted into a Dubai one rarely fails because the idea is wrong. It fails because every load-bearing part of it was written for a different legal system, and none of those parts travelled.
When a supplier goes under owing you goods
Administration is a change of control, not a pause, and the administrator has no duty to finish your order. What decides your recovery is a narrower question than most buyers expect: on the day, did the goods belong to you?
In-House Lawyer Cost in Dubai: Salary Plus Gratuity, Visa and Insurance
The salary on a Dubai offer letter is the basic figure, and often not even the whole package. Here is what a first legal hire in the UAE adds to it, with the source for every number.
The contract auto-renewed and nobody noticed
The notice window is the operative term, not the length of the contract. What a business can realistically do once the window has closed, and how a register stops it happening twice.
Employing somebody in the UAE: the three documents
A job offer, a contract registered with MOHRE and an internal contract written in head office. They rarely agree, and only one of them is the document that governs.
Setting up in the DIFC: what the licence does not cover
The licence is the part of setting up in the DIFC that has a receipt, and it is also the part that is finished. Employment, data, the commercial terms and the structure above the entity are four separate pieces of work, and they bite in that order.
How much an outsourced General Counsel costs in the UK
The buying question, answered structurally rather than with a number: what sits inside a fixed monthly retainer, what is billed separately, what an employed lawyer costs once the salary stops being the whole figure, and the three points at which the arithmetic flips.
Employing people in the UAE while the company stays British
A UK company opening in Dubai has to decide who employs whom before the first hire, not after. Free zone against mainland, the UK contract that does not travel, and the intra-group agreement that makes the whole thing legible.
The service charge on a second site: what to cap before you sign
It arrives quarterly, it gets paid, and on one site nobody notices. On two it compounds, because the same drafting sits in both leases and neither was read at the point it could still have been changed.
The first ninety days after a raise: what changes on paper
The money arrives and the company is suddenly a different legal object: it has investors with rights, a board that has to decide things properly, and a set of promises about ownership it may not be able to keep. What has to exist, in what order, and what can wait.
Who owns the code your contractor wrote?
Paying the invoice does not buy the copyright. What the default position is, why a clause in an email will not carry it, and what to do when the person who built your product left three years ago.
The service charge demand: what a commercial tenant can actually challenge
It arrives as a certificate with a figure on it and looks final. It is an account of how a contractual mechanism has been applied, and accounts can be wrong.
Four advisers, four jurisdictions, and nobody holding the list
A family office rarely lacks good advisers. What it lacks is one person who can say, on any given morning, what is outstanding across all of them — and the standing to go and chase it.
The rent review you did not diary
The letter proposes a number and gives you a short period to respond. Everything that decides how much room you have was settled years earlier, in a clause nobody has read since.
Your business rates bill went up. What you can actually challenge
The bill is a calculation, and the calculation is rarely the thing that is wrong. The rateable value underneath it is, and that is the part that can be challenged.
Your business rates bill is wrong: what a challenge actually involves
A rateable value is an opinion, and opinions can be wrong. What the Check, Challenge and Appeal process asks of a business, how long it really takes, and how to work out whether it is worth running at all.
Service charges in a commercial lease: what a tenant can actually challenge
The rent is negotiated and the service charge is not, which is why over a ten-year term it is often the number that moves most. Three grounds decide almost every dispute, and disliking the total is not one of them.
The family office register: what one document should tell you
Most family offices have good advisers in four jurisdictions and no single place where the entities, the dates and the obligations sit together. The register is that place, and the test of it is whether anybody can say what is outstanding without making a phone call.
A winding-up petition has been served: the first seven days
The petition is the most serious letter a company receives, and the week after it lands is mostly about protecting the things that keep trading possible: the bank account, the supply chain, and the contracts that treat insolvency as a trigger.
When the lease runs out: renewal, and who controls the timing
A protected business tenancy does not end on the date written in the lease. It ends when somebody serves the right notice — and the side that serves first controls the timetable, the terms and, usually, the rent.
Your first legal hire: what the job actually is
The work arrives long before the budget does. What the role actually involves, what a single hire can and cannot absorb, and how to tell which of the three routes your business needs.
The dilapidations schedule at the end of a lease: what you actually owe
It is itemised, it looks official, and the number at the bottom bears no relation to the building you occupied. It is a claim for damages, and the statute caps it at the landlord’s loss rather than the cost of the works.
Opening a Dubai entity: what the UK company actually signs
The licence takes a fortnight and a formation agent. The documents that decide whether the structure works — the intra-group agreements, who employs whom, and where the IP sits — are the ones nobody sells you as a package.
When a customer stops paying: the order of things
A good customer going quiet on an invoice is a different problem from a bad customer refusing to pay. There is an order to working out which one you have, and it starts with the contract rather than the phone.
Your supplier contract renewed itself. Now what?
The auto-renewal clause is three lines long and sits near the back. It decides whether you are committed for another twelve months, and most businesses read it the week after the window shut.
Buying an AI tool: the contract questions that actually matter
The demo answers what the tool does. The contract answers what happens to your data, who owns the output, and who carries the cost when the model is confidently wrong.
Fair maintainable trade: how your rent and rateable value get decided
Two of the largest fixed costs in a pub, hotel or leisure business are set by an estimate of what a competent operator could earn from the building. Not what you earn. What the assessor believes the property can sustain.
Drawing down a growth facility: what the covenants actually restrict
The term sheet was about the money. The facility agreement is about everything you must keep doing, and everything you may no longer do without asking, for as long as the money is outstanding.
Your first employee outside the UK
The offer is agreed and the only question left looks administrative: how do we pay them? It is not administrative, and the contract you have used for every UK hire has stopped doing the job.
When does a founder-led business need a holding company?
One company works for years, until a raise, a second business line or a departing co-founder makes it the wrong shape. A holding company solves a specific set of problems well, and several others not at all.
When a Customer Will Not Pay: Recovering a B2B Debt in the UK
Ninety days late, no reply, and a growing suspicion that chasing it costs more than it is worth. The order you do things in decides whether you get paid.
Who Owns the Code Your Contractors Wrote?
Most founders assume paying for work means owning it. In UK law that is true of employees and false of contractors, and the gap usually surfaces in diligence.
The first ninety days after a seed round closes
The wire clears and the congratulations arrive. Underneath them sits a list of obligations that started running the day the documents were signed, and most of it lands on the founder.
Can a housing association sue you for building safety defects years later?
The Building Safety Act reopened claims most contractors had written off as time-barred. Thirty years is not a typographical error, and the corporate structure that used to absorb the risk no longer does.
Branded residences in Dubai: the questions a UK hotel group should answer first
The brand is the asset, and a branded residences deal is the moment you hand it to somebody else's building for twenty years. These are the questions worth settling before the term sheet.
Your First In-House Lawyer After a PE Buy-In: What the Job Spec Doesn't Say
When a private equity sponsor backs a healthcare business and creates a Head of Legal role reporting to the CFO, the job spec is usually the smallest part of the job. Here's what to scope before that person starts — and how to cover the gap until they do.
What an In-House Lawyer Really Costs in the UK
Salary is the number on the offer letter. It is not the number that lands on the P&L. Here is the arithmetic a founder needs before signing off a first legal hire.
Can You Appeal an Energy Ombudsman Decision?
There is no appeal button inside the Energy Ombudsman scheme. What you have instead is a choice — accept, or reject and go elsewhere — and the deadline for making it is shorter than most people think.
UK Company Opening in Dubai: The Legal Checklist Nobody Gives You
Setting up in Dubai isn't a single registration step — it's a sequence of decisions that each close off the next one. Sam Ansloos sets out the order they actually arrive in, and where a specialist has to take over.
Which Entity Signs the Contract? The Question That Decides UK–UAE Disputes
In a UK–UAE group, the name on the signature block is not administrative detail. It decides which court or tribunal can hear a dispute, whether a judgment can be enforced, and which tax authority takes an interest.
Your Energy Supplier Billed You Wrong: The Business Dispute Route That Actually Works
A wrong energy bill is a cash-flow problem dressed up as paperwork. Here's the escalation ladder — complaint, deadlock, Ombudsman, recovery — and the deadlines that decide whether the money comes back at all.
Served a Winding-Up Petition? What Hospitality Operators Need to Do in the First 7 Days
A winding-up petition is not a stern letter to be filed with the invoices. It can freeze the bank account within days and put the business in front of a liquidator within weeks — and most of what can be done about it has to happen in the first week.
When to Hire a General Counsel: The Maths at 30, 100 and 300 Staff
Founders usually ask the general counsel question at the wrong moment — either long after a redundancy round has gone wrong, or far too early, when a single hire can't justify its own salary. Here is where the maths actually turns, staff count by staff count.
First Legal Hire for a UK Startup: In-House Lawyer, Retainer, or Outsourced GC?
Founders usually frame this as a choice between hiring someone and finding a law firm. There's a third option most arrive at eventually — an outsourced General Counsel function — and it's worth weighing all three before signing anything.
Fractional or full-time General Counsel: who it suits and when to switch
Founders searching for a fractional General Counsel are usually trying to avoid two bad options: an expensive full-time hire they don't yet need, or a law firm relationship that only turns up when there's a bill attached. Here's what the model actually is.
How to Get People to Pay: Structured Recovery Beats Aggression
Chasing harder rarely collects faster. A fixed escalation calendar, statutory interest applied by default and an honest decision point do — and they cost less.
Business Rates Are a Turnover Tax on Hospitality — How to Run a Challenge That Actually Wins
For pubs, hotels and much of the licensed trade, the rateable value is derived from trade. That makes rates behave like a tax on turnover — payable whether or not the site makes money. Here is how a challenge is won, and what has to be in place before the Challenge button is pressed.
Nobody Kept the Share Register: Who Owns What When Two Founders Fall Out
A cap table lives in three places — the register of members, the Companies House file and everyone's memory. Only the first one decides ownership in law, and most founder-led companies have never written it up.
The adjudication you cannot use
Adjudication is the fast lane for getting paid on a build — until it isn't. Four contract facts decide whether the lane is open, and all four are knowable before you serve a notice.
Before you hire a Legal Advisor in Dubai, work out which law your contracts are actually under
UK founders opening a UAE arm keep advertising for an on-site contract administrator. Most of the real exposure is sitting in English-law parent agreements, IP ownership and the licence behind the entity — which makes that a good second hire and a poor first one.
Where nine per cent of your revenue goes
Contract value rarely leaks in a single expensive event. It leaks quietly, through renewal dates nobody owns.
The letter before action, and what it actually buys you
Most disputes are settled by the quality of the first letter, not by the threat at the end of it.
Free zone or mainland: the question founders ask last
The decision is usually made by whoever incorporated first, then lived with for years.
Your break clause is a deadline, not an option
Most break clauses fail on a condition nobody read, not on a decision anyone took.
What a fully loaded General Counsel actually costs
The comparison is not our fee against an hourly rate. It is our fee against the hire you would otherwise make.