Deal done but are you protected?

2015 has seen growing business confidence and many sectors becoming more commercially active than has been the case for a while. With this confidence, as the economy improves, it's quite easy for businesses to fall prey to a false sense of security and allow the enthusiasm and urgency to complete a deal to unhinge the careful balance to be drawn between the gains to be made and the potential pitfalls further down the line. Nick Lambert, who heads up Wake Smith's commercial litigation department, says businesses need to spend just as much time thinking about the legal protections they need in any particular deal as they do about the commercial justification for the deal itself. Get that wrong and it is likely to have costly repercussions later on. Nick said: "The enthusiasm to complete the deal can often be at the expense of failing to deal yourself a strong hand in the unfortunate event that things do not go quite as you hoped. "As business confidence grows and more deals are brought to the table it's easy to lose sight of the importance of making sure that if things do go wrong, you are in the strongest position you can be. What would happen if the directors fall out, if a major delivery doesn't arrive on time, if a supplier isn't performing, if a big customer doesn't pay you on time and so on. "This is where we come into the process, after the deal is done and circumstances change in a manner that adversely affects one of the parties or the deal itself, which may have been completed months or even years previously." The litigation team at Wake Smith of Nick, Mark Serby, Liz Shaw, Holly Dobson, Stephen Thompson, Sarah McLaughlin and Louisa Kearns, are experts at resolving disputes both in and out of court on behalf of their business clients. Nick added: "The strength of our team means we can cover the spectrum of litigation. I concentrate on weightier commercial disputes, Liz concentrates on property disputes, Mark specialises in employment and intellectual property disputes, Holly handles employment matters and a variety of esoteric areas such as coroner's proceedings, Stephen Thompson focuses on resolving disputes for individuals, and Louisa Kearns deals with debt recovery, mainly business to business "The team is highly experienced and extremely good at what they do, as has been proven by feedback from around the industry including legal benchmark The Legal 500 results where the team was praised as excellent negotiators and litigators, as having extensive experience of mediation and alternative dispute resolution and going that extra mile for clients."