Corporate Law
SKW Schwarz has been advising large corporations, medium-sized companies and family-managed private companies for years in all matters of corporate law, from the establishment until the sale or IPO of a company. We are familiar with complex legal problems which arise in particular for groups and with all issues of corporate law which affect different types of companies.
We support our clients not only in restructurings, mergers, spin-offs, the sale of company departments, joint ventures, changes in the legal form and other transactions, but also in day-to-day business. For example, we organise shareholder meetings and give advice to managers, managing directors and shareholders.
SKW Schwarz’s advice to companies also includes legal representation in court and dispute resolution, for example if partners in a company disagree.
We offer our services both at the national and the international level. The destination is unimportant. However, we are particularly specialised in French law. Our years of experience with the French legal system and, of course, our knowledge of the French mentality and language help us to conduct German-French transactions.
We are active across all sectors. Our expertise is particularly strong in the media sector (movies, TV, press, publishing companies); other focuses are IT law, internet and e-business and the connection between technology and content and increasingly life sciences and biotech. Our assignments on behalf of a large Scandinavian furniture company have given us in-depth knowledge about the furniture sector.
Examples
On behalf of a bank which specialises in central clearing and is the majority owner of an institution which also works in this sector we have prepared and successfully implemented the squeeze-out of the only minority shareholder. The procedure took only five months from the preparation of the squeeze-out demand of the majority owner until the completion and the payment of an appropriate cash consideration.
Following the wholesale purchase of the majority of voting rights and the mandatory offer pursuant to the Securities Acquisition and Takeover Act (Wertpapiererwerbs- und Übernahmegesetz), a private-equity fund has become the majority shareholder of a company which we advise and which is listed in the General Standard. We support the company in meeting its regular corporate and capital-market obligations, including the preparation of the shareholder meeting. In doing so we focus on the company’s interest of bringing the expenses for these obligations in line with its capital-market presence; among other things, we have worked on the extent such a company has to actively monitor compliance with the corporate governance code.
We have advised a large German publishing house on a joint venture with a multimedia agency on the maintenance of a special interest platform on the internet. In particular, we structured the joint venture agreement, above all in terms of financing obligations and selling rights.