Who We Support

We work with a diverse range of organisations in the creative, cultural, and charitable sectors, from long-standing institutions to exciting new ventures still finding their way. What unites our clients isn't specific legal structure or art form, but a shared need for guidance that matches their artistic or charitable goals and the governance, contracts, and structures that support them. The groups listed below offer a glimpse into the wonderful range of people we assist, although many clients belong to more than one category.

Arts and cultural organisations

We advise performing and visual arts companies, music organisations, festivals and creative companies of every size, from touring theatre and orchestras to galleries and independent producers. We work with individuals too, including writers, directors and composers, helping with the contracts, rights and arrangements behind their creative work. We also support the venues and producing houses at the heart of the sector: the arts centres, concert halls, theatres and studios that are as much buildings and businesses as they are creative spaces, many of them charitable trusts caring for a much-loved building. Our help ranges from the everyday contracts and licences that keep a production on the road to the property, employment and governance questions that come with running a venue.

Museums, heritage, libraries and archives

A great deal of our work is with charities, community interest companies, community benefit societies, social enterprises, voluntary action bodies, and the guilds, membership and umbrella bodies that hold sectors together. We help at every stage, from choosing the right structure and registering with the Charity Commission or the Financial Conduct Authority to redrafting an outgrown constitution, merging with another organisation, or setting up a trading subsidiary. We advise trustees and directors on their duties, managing conflicts of interest, and the questions that keep them awake, from reserves and restricted funds to safeguarding and serious incident reporting. Much of it is the everyday paperwork that keeps an organisation compliant, and we try to make it as straightforward as possible, so our clients can stay on the right side of the rules and get on with the work that matters to them.

Charities, social enterprises and membership bodies

The screen sector

We work right across the screen sector, from film and television to animation, visual effects, video games and other interactive and digital content. Because so much of the workforce is freelance and project-based, we spend a lot of time on the things that structure comes down to in practice, engagement terms and worker status, intellectual property and rights in what people create, and the day-to-day compliance around pay, working time and safe, respectful sets. We help producers and companies handle grievances, disciplinaries and complaints fairly and at production pace, when getting a process right matters most and is hardest to do well under pressure. Our contribution to WorkWise for Screen, the sector's good-practice resource, keeps us close to how these industries really work day to day, and to the rules as they change.

Education

We help schools, colleges, universities and other educational settings with the partnerships and collaborations that bring creative and cultural work into education, from artist residencies and co- productions to shared use of spaces and joint programmes with cultural organisations. Much of this turns on getting the framework right underneath it, the contracts, the intellectual property in what students and staff create, data protection, and safeguarding when children and young people are involved. We help put those arrangements in place calmly and clearly, so a good idea can go ahead with confidence rather than stall on the paperwork.

Local authorities, public bodies and place

We advise local authorities and public bodies, including on the cultural strategies and plans that increasingly shape how a place invests in its creative life. Placemaking is a growing part of this, as culture moves to the centre of how towns and cities renew themselves and as funding and decision- making shift out towards the regions. We work with the place partnerships, cultural compacts and development trusts springing up to lead it, often helping to design the structure and governance from scratch, whether that is establishing a new independent charitable trust to take on cultural provision, setting up a body to hold and distribute funding, or advising on procurement, subsidy control and the agreements that tie partners together. It is a different kind of relationship from advising a single organisation, and we relish it, working as a partner in shaping cultural life across a whole place.

Funders, trusts and foundations

We act for funders, grant-makers, charitable trusts and foundations, advising both on their own governance and on the grants and relationships through which they support others. We help with trustee duties, investment and spending policies, the balance between endowment and expenditure, and the constitutional questions that come with holding money for the long term. On their grant- making, we draft the funding agreements, conditions and monitoring arrangements that let a funder support others with confidence and account properly for public or charitable money. Seeing both sides of the funding relationship, the giving and the receiving, gives us a real feel for what makes it work well, and for where it tends to go wrong.

Fellow professional advisers

We're also glad to support fellow professional advisers, solicitors, accountants and consultants, who want specialist charity and cultural sector expertise for their own clients. Charity law and the workings of the cultural world are a niche, and a general practice does not always have that depth in- house, so we are often brought in behind the scenes on a single point or a whole matter. We can advise you and your client together, or quietly support you in the background, whichever suits the relationship you have built. Either way we stick to the question we were asked and leave that relationship exactly as we found it, so you can offer your clients specialist help without sending them elsewhere.