Entering the EU · for companies from the UK, UAE, Singapore, Türkiye and the US
Selling into the EU is a contract problem before it is a legal one.
Your first EU customers raise questions your home paper never had to answer: which entity signs, whose law governs, what the DPA and the transfer mechanism have to say, who your first employees work for, and how VAT lands on the invoice. One desk for all of it.
Icon.Partners has worked across more than 40 jurisdictions since 2012 — corporate structuring, licensing, tax and commercial work, with locally admitted lawyers on staff in each market. Every matter is handled by Icon.Partners’ own lawyers. The team is qualified across English, Estonian, Polish and EU law, and Icon.Partners has locally admitted lawyers on staff in the jurisdictions our clients sell into — including Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France and the UK. When a contract is governed by the law of a specific country, the review is done by our lawyer admitted there. We do not refer work out and no third-party firm is involved in your matters.
16.1This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of England and Walesthe Federal Republic of Germany, excluding its conflict-of-law rules. The courts of Berlin shall have exclusive jurisdiction.
The moment the governing law changes
One clause, and half the document now means something else.
Governing law is the clause nobody fights about — until a European enterprise customer insists on their own. At that point the liability cap, the warranty disclaimers and the termination mechanics are all read under a different legal system, and a lawyer qualified elsewhere is now guessing. We do not guess. We hand it to someone qualified there, and you never see the hand-off.
The rule we work by
Local law, local lawyer. Always.
Our own jurisdictions
Every matter is handled by Icon.Partners’ own lawyers. The team is qualified across English, Estonian, Polish and EU law, and Icon.Partners has locally admitted lawyers on staff in the jurisdictions our clients sell into — including Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France and the UK. When a contract is governed by the law of a specific country, the review is done by our lawyer admitted there. We do not refer work out and no third-party firm is involved in your matters.
Everything else
Handled by locally qualified lawyers in the relevant jurisdiction, coordinated through Icon.Partners. You get one point of contact and one invoice instead of assembling and managing three separate firms yourself.
When local-law advice is required, we use locally qualified counsel. Always. A single office claiming to cover forty countries is the claim worth examining — not because it is always wrong, but because the advice is only as good as the qualification behind it.
Where it comes up
The situations that trigger it.
Next step
Bring the contract that is stuck.
Usually it is one clause and one jurisdiction. Twenty minutes is generally enough to tell you whether it is a real problem or a drafting one.