What to expect from a Legal Discovery Day

What it is

Most legal advice is reactive. Something goes wrong, you call a lawyer. A Legal Discovery Day is the opposite, a structured session designed to map your legal landscape before the problems arrive.

You spend half a day with a senior lawyer from Silva. We work through your business, your structure, your contracts, your people, your risk. At the end, you leave with a written output: a clear view of where you are, what matters most, and what to do first.

It is not a consultation. It is not a pitch. It is a piece of work, delivered in a day, with a fixed fee and a defined output.

Who it is for

A Legal Discovery Day suits businesses at a specific moment, usually one of these:

1. You are growing and want to know whether your legal foundations are solid enough to support that growth.
2. You are about to raise funding, take on a major client or sign a significant contract and want to go in with a clear view of your position.
3. You have been operating without dedicated legal support and want a baseline, an honest assessment of where things stand.
4. You are facing a decision (expansion, acquisition, restructure) and want legal input before you commit, not after.

It also works well as the first step in an ongoing retainer relationship. The Discovery Day maps the ground; the retainer covers the territory.

What happens on the day

The session is structured. We cover the areas most relevant to your business, typically these four:

1. Corporate structure and governance. How the business is set up, who owns what, how decisions get made. Most businesses have at least one thing here worth tidying.
2. Contracts and commercial relationships. Your standard terms, your supplier and customer contracts, any significant ongoing agreements. We look at what you are relying on and whether it holds up.
3. Employment and people. Contracts, policies, IP assignment, restrictive covenants. This area is where quiet problems accumulate, and where they tend to surface at the worst time.
4. Regulatory and compliance. Relevant obligations for your sector and size. Data protection, licensing, consumer law where applicable. Not a compliance audit, a reality check.

The session runs for three to four hours. We ask questions, review documents you share in advance, and work through the picture together.

What you get

By the end of the day, you have a written Discovery Report. This covers:

1. A summary of your current legal position, what is solid, what has gaps, what needs attention.
2. A prioritised action list, not everything at once, but a clear order of what to address first and why.
3. An honest assessment of urgency, distinguishing the genuinely time-sensitive from the things that can wait.
4. A view of next steps, whether further work is needed, what that would involve, and what it would cost.

There is no obligation to instruct Silva for anything beyond the Discovery Day. The report is yours. Some clients act on it themselves. Many choose to continue with us, either through specific project work or on a retainer.

How to prepare

We send a short briefing document a week before the session. It asks for some basic information about your business and flags the documents to collect, typically your articles, shareholder agreement, key contracts and employment documents. You do not need to have everything perfectly organised. We work with what you have.

The more context you can share before the day, the more useful the session will be. But even with minimal preparation, a Discovery Day produces something useful, most businesses have more clarity at the end than they had at the start.

Frequently asked questions