Disputes modelled first
The likely conflicts of the new market traced to forum and enforcement before signature — the trace that reveals the structure's real weak points.
International business expansion
New markets bring new counterparties — and new ways to be sued.
Dispute-aware international expansion counsel from Aun & Co.: contracts, structures and enforcement routes designed before the first cross-border deal is signed.
Expansion advice usually covers tax and incorporation; the disputes dimension arrives later, as a surprise. Which country's courts will hear the fight with your new distributor, whether a judgment from there reaches anyone's assets, what the local mandatory rules do to your carefully chosen governing law — these questions are cheap at the planning stage and ruinous afterwards. The firm adds the conflict lens to expansion: structures and contracts designed for the disputes the new market will eventually produce.
The work spans
- Dispute-clause architecture for cross-border distribution and supply
- Enforcement mapping: where judgments and awards actually reach
- Local mandatory rules that override your governing-law choice
- Entity and liability structure with conflict scenarios modelled
- Coordination with local counsel in the target market
- You are appointing a first distributor abroad and the draft is their template, not yours.
- Your expansion structure was designed for tax and no one has modelled it for conflict.
- A new market's mandatory local rules may quietly override your governing-law clause.
- Deals across several countries are accumulating and their dispute clauses agree on nothing.
Each target market is entered on paper first: the firm models the three most likely disputes — distributor termination, payment default, IP or data friction — and traces each through the proposed contracts to a forum and an enforcement endpoint. Where the trace dead-ends, the structure changes: a different seat, a security package, a restructured entity chain. Local counsel verify the local layer; the firm holds the strategic map from Israel.
04 · What you get
Termination priced in
Distributor and agency exits are where expansion disputes concentrate; the contracts are built around that ending from the start.
One strategic file
Local counsel execute locally while a single coordinating counsel keeps the cross-border dispute posture coherent.
A typical engagement: a company entering two new markets simultaneously has each local deal drafted on the counterparty's paper. The firm harmonises the dispute architecture — one arbitral seat, aligned governing law, security on payment terms — before the relationships are old enough to fight about it.
Described in abbreviated, anonymised form to preserve client confidentiality.
Which law should govern our international distribution agreements?
A law you know, applied in a forum whose output enforces where the counterparty's assets are — subject to the target market's mandatory rules, which in many countries protect local distributors regardless of the chosen law. That last layer is the one expansion planning most often misses.
Can we enforce an Israeli judgment against a foreign distributor?
Sometimes — it depends on the recognition rules of the country where the assets sit. Where that route is doubtful, an arbitration clause is usually the correction: awards travel under the New York Convention 1958 far more reliably than judgments travel at all.
What does dispute-aware expansion planning cost relative to the alternative?
A fraction. The planning work is measured in days of counsel time per market; a single misdesigned distributor termination routinely costs multiples of the entire expansion's legal budget. The economics of prevention here are unusually one-sided.