Do I Need A Lawyer To Incorporate A Company?
There is no legal requirement to retain a lawyer to incorporate a company. Any person can incorporate a company. There are however benefits in retaining our services to incorporate a company for you.
Name reservation
The first step in incorporating a company is to reserve a name. When submitting the name approval request, one can submit up to 3 names for approval. It may take up to 7 business days for the name approval request to be processed.
Before we submit the name approval request, we will review the list of existing companies to determine if your name choices or similar names have already been taken. If we think that your name choices will not be approved by the Registrar, we will ask you to come up with other names. By doing so, we save you time and money.
Corporate share structure
We will assist you in determining which type of share structure is most suitable to your business. For instance, you may issue shares to investors of your company but you may not want those investors to participate in the operations of the company. In such case, you may wish to create classes of non-voting shares and issue such shares to the investors.
Articles
We will prepare Articles tailor-made to your company’s needs, setting out the special rights and restrictions of the different classes of shares. These rights and restrictions may relate to voting rights, entitlement to dividends, redemption rights, wind-up priority etc.
Post-incorporation documents
We will create a Records Book to retain the Certificate of Incorporation, Incorporation Application, Incorporation Agreement, Notice of Articles and Articles of the company. We will also prepare documents required by the Business Corporations Act to be kept at its records office. These documents include:
- Central Securities Register
- Register of Directors
- Consent to Act as Director for each director
- Minutes of shareholders approving the incorporation, waiving the appointment of an auditor, and appointing the first directors of the company
- Minutes of directors appointing officers, approving the location of the Registered and Records offices, approving the issuance of shares, determining the financial year end and other matters
- Share Certificates
Other matters
Any person acting as a director of a company should be aware that there are many statutes imposing duties on directors and exposing them to liabilities. We will explain to you these duties and liabilities, and how to minimize exposure to liability.
We can also act as your Registered and Records Office to ensure your Records Book is kept up to date, in accordance with the requirements of the Business Corporations Act. We will also assist you in preparing and filing the annual report, together with related directors’ and shareholders’ resolutions.
By assisting you with the incorporation and post-incorporation matters, we ensure your company is set up properly. We take care of the legal matters so that you can focus on managing your business.