International business reorganisations

• Pre-deal separations and carve outs
• Post-deal integrations
• Pre-spin/IPO reorganisations

We develop legal structures that simplify the complexities inherent in corporate deals. Engaging our legal team from the outset helps to maximise the potential for value creation and empowers you to address critical legal issues before deal decisions are made. Early legal support can pre-empt potential challenges and delays during implementaton.

In addition, we provide technology-enabled global execution. Working with PwC business specialists, we design legal entity structures, provide full legal implementation support, draft legal documentation and manage signing processes across borders.

• Corporate simplifications
• Structure and business simplification
• Branch establishments and transfers

Realise significant year-on-year cost savings by simplifying and rationalising your group’s legal entity structure and intra-group transactions. Having a simpler and more transparent structure allows you to respond to business needs with speed and agility, reduces the risk of a mismatch between legal and operational demands, and facilitates good corporate governance practices.

We undertake initial legal feasibility studies to help identify opportunities for transformation, develop optimal legal structures and create detailed legal action plans. Once decisions are made, we provide full legal implementation support.

• Alignment of legal structure and business divisions
• Intra-group cross-border mergers and single European entity projects

Operational and supply chain changes have broad and varied impacts across the business, particularly in highly regulated industries. As you restructure business models to accommodate the fast-changing commercial landscape, your legal structure must adapt in step with the operational structure. Agile and resilient legal structures are critical to meet the demands of a changing world. Our lawyers collaborate with PwC‘s consulting and tax experts to provide an integrated solution and improve business alignment.

• Day-to-day corporate reorganisation and transitional commercial arrangements
• Cash repatriation
• Financing and refinancing structuring

Increasingly, companies are repatriating cash to their headquarters to boost cash flow. This process requires legal scrutiny and expert advice to ensure legal processes are managed correctly. Our lawyers work together with tax experts and other business consultants as a close team so that every aspect of your transaction is considered and coordinated – and you can operate with greater confidence.

• Project management of cross-border transactions
• Development of legal step plans
• Transaction implementation

Robust project management and governance practices are crucial to project success and efficient service delivery. Our lawyers work with project management professionals to complete some of the most challenging and complex legal projects with minimal disruption. With legal project management support from PwC, you get better visibility into your budget and fees and can mitigate execution risks.

We leverage proven governance processes and detailed legal plans to keep your project aligned with the overall transaction execution goals. We drive project implementation, working alongside your internal and external stakeholders as part of a multi-disciplinary team.

For efficiency, we use a variety of technology solutions like collaboration and document management platforms, document automation tools, electronic signatures and filterable legal action plans. We manage projects effectively and transparently. You can access project information in real time, giving you more confidence at every step.

• Centralisation of IP ownership, control and management
• Alignment of IP model to business model
• Cross-border migration and exploitation of IP
• Analysis of IP for compliance with international tax legislation or in response to challenges by tax authorities

International tax authorities are significantly changing how they view IP, and multinational companies are responding by re-examining their IP models and restructuring them to align more fully with operations and tax compliance requirements. There’s an urgency to understand how IP operates within a group from an economic, legal and commercial perspective – and to respond with a strong, future-proof IP model. Companies need to optimise IP, safeguard its protection and ensure that it stands up to international tax rules.

We have a detailed and nuanced understanding of IP rights and how they function as a critical business asset across many different sectors.  Working with IP tax specialists around the world, our IP lawyers also have vast expertise in specialised intragroup IP transactions and the range of complex challenges they engender, as well as unparalleled experience in designing, assessing and implementing tax-compliant IP models.