Structure before story
A corporate map that shows where control actually sits, which is where most of these cases are won.
Deadlock, broken trust, and a dispute over who controls the business, resolved before it destroys the value it is fought over.
The most damaging commercial disputes are between insiders: co-founders, family partners, shareholders who once aligned and no longer do. They are damaging because the fight runs through the company itself - its accounts, its decisions, its ability to operate. The firm treats the business as the asset to be protected, not the battlefield.
The firm separates two maps that insiders tend to blur: the corporate structure (who owns and controls what, entity by entity) and the personal narrative (who did what to whom). Keeping distinct entities legally distinct is often the whole defence, or the whole claim. It then asks the only question that matters commercially - can these parties keep operating together, or is the work to engineer a clean separation - and runs the dispute toward that answer.
A corporate map that shows where control actually sits, which is where most of these cases are won.
Relief that keeps the business running rather than freezing it into decline.
Where parting is the answer, an exit engineered so the dispute does not reopen a year later.
The firm defends the principals of a closely held business in a high-value claim that sought to collapse two corporate entities into one and reach the individuals behind them. The defence holds the entities legally separate and resists piercing, narrowing the real exposure.
Described in abbreviated, anonymised form to preserve client confidentiality.
Through the mechanism in the shareholders agreement if one exists, and failing that through court relief that can order a buy-out, a sale process, or in the last resort a winding up; the goal is almost always a priced separation rather than dissolution.
Yes, in the right circumstances a court can order a buy-out, and where an agreement already provides for one it will be enforced; the fight is usually about price and timing.
The company law and the duties owed between holders still apply, but the absence of an agreed exit mechanism makes provisional relief and a clear demand record more important, not less.