Founders arrive better prepared.
PartnerReady helps Irish founders surface equity, exit, governance and founder-alignment risks before the first solicitor meeting — so the conversation in your office starts at structure, not at discovery.
PartnerReady is explicitly not a legal service. We do not draft, we do not advise, we do not interpret the Companies Act 2014. We send your clients in with the difficult conversations already started — so your time is spent on structure, drafting and judgement.
The conversations you keep having that should have happened earlier
Every Irish corporate solicitor advising founders sees the same patterns. They are rarely about the law. They are about what was never agreed.
Equity assumed, never agreed
Founders arrive with verbal splits that no one can quite remember the basis for, then ask you to paper a number that already feels uncomfortable to one of them.
Exits never discussed
Drag-along, tag-along, deemed-transfer events — and you discover none of them have ever talked about what happens if one founder wants out in year two.
50/50 with no tie-break
Two founders, equal shares, no chair, no casting vote, no deadlock mechanism, no shareholder reserved matters list. The risk is invisible to them and obvious to you.
IP that lives on a personal laptop
Code, brand assets and contracts created before incorporation that have never been formally assigned to the company by either founder.
Asymmetric commitment
One founder is full-time, one is still in employment. Vesting has never been mentioned. Nobody has agreed what happens if the part-time founder never goes full-time.
Resentment that pre-dates you
By the time it reaches your office it presents as a drafting question. Underneath it is six months of unspoken tension that no shareholders' agreement will fix.
Where PartnerReady fits in your workflow
Founders complete a structured 60-question diagnostic before they sit down with you. The output is a categorised risk report you can read in two minutes.
- First meeting spent on discovery: who does what, who owns what, who put in what
- Equity conversation happens live, in front of you, often for the first time
- Drafting blocked while founders go away to ‘talk it through’
- Resentment surfaces during signature, not before
- First meeting opens with a shared written baseline of what is agreed and what is not
- Equity, exit and IP positions documented before drafting begins
- Reserved matters and deadlock preferences already discussed between founders
- Drafting time spent on structure, not on extracting positions
- 1 · Founders complete the diagnostic
Either independently referred by you, or routed through a partner intake link. Each founder answers separately so misalignment is visible.
- 2 · Report generated
Six-category risk report with founder-by-founder comparison, flagged divergences and an executive summary.
- 3 · You receive the brief
Founders forward the report to your firm. You arrive at the meeting already knowing where the friction lives.
- 4 · Drafting begins from clarity
Shareholders' agreement, articles and ancillary documents drafted against a position that the founders have already pressure-tested with each other.
What the report surfaces
The diagnostic is built around the six categories that recur in Irish founder disputes. Each is scored separately and flagged where founder answers diverge.
Equity blind spots
Where one founder believes a verbal promise exists that the other does not recall, or where contributions and equity are materially out of step.
Vesting and cliff gaps
Companies operating with no vesting, no cliff, and no leaver mechanics — the single most common preventable shareholder dispute in Irish practice.
Governance and decision risk
50/50 ownership with no tie-break, no chair, no reserved matters list, no agreed escalation path.
Exit and transfer confusion
Founders who have never discussed what happens if one wants to leave, sell, or be bought out — and have no shared understanding of valuation mechanics.
Compensation and runway tension
Salary expectations, dividend assumptions and runway pressure that founders have never compared in writing.
Commitment and ambition mismatch
Lifestyle business vs venture-scale ambition, full-time vs side-project commitment, exit-in-three vs build-for-twenty horizons.
Why solicitors refer founders to PartnerReady
Reclaims billable judgement time
Less time extracting positions, more time exercising the legal judgement clients are actually paying for.
Improves the first meeting
Clients arrive informed, less defensive, and able to engage with structural questions instead of being introduced to them.
Reduces post-signature regret
Issues surface before drafting, not after. Fewer founders return six months later asking how to unwind an agreement they did not fully understand.
Positions the firm as proactive
Recommending a structured pre-incorporation diagnostic is a quietly powerful signal of how the firm thinks about its clients.
Protects the founder relationship
When the difficult conversation has already happened, founders associate the agreement — and you — with clarity, not with the moment things got tense.
How firms partner with PartnerReady
We work with Irish corporate firms in three ways. None of them require you to take on platform risk, sell the product, or alter your engagement letter.
Referral partnership
A simple, named referral relationship. Your clients are routed through a partner link, the report is shared with your firm, and onward engagement happens entirely on your terms.
Firm-branded intake
A co-branded version of the diagnostic for firms that want a structured intake step before any new founder engagement. Useful for firms running founder clinics or accelerator legal panels.
White-label roadmap
For firms building productised pre-incorporation packages, a white-label option is on the roadmap. We are speaking to a small number of design-partner firms now.
Built to be referred with confidence.
Irish-specific by design
Built around the Companies Act 2014, Revenue practice, and how Irish founders actually structure early-stage companies — not a US template.
Reviewed by Irish solicitors
Question wording, scoring weights and risk thresholds reviewed by practising Irish corporate solicitors before release.
Deterministic scoring
No generative AI in the diagnostic engine. Each answer maps to documented weights — outputs are reproducible and auditable.
GDPR compliant
Hosted in the EU, encrypted in transit and at rest, no profiling, no third-party data sale, full export and deletion on request.
Stripe-secured payments
Lite Check is free. The Full Report is processed via Stripe with no card data stored on PartnerReady infrastructure.
Preparation, not advice
PartnerReady is explicitly not a regulated legal or financial service. We prepare founders for your conversation — we do not replace it.
Questions partner firms ask us
Is PartnerReady legal advice?+
No. PartnerReady is explicitly not a regulated legal service and does not provide legal advice. It is a structured pre-incorporation diagnostic. Every report carries a clear notice directing founders to qualified Irish solicitors for legal advice.
Does it replace a shareholders' agreement?+
No. It is the opposite — it is what should happen before a shareholders' agreement is drafted. The report is designed to make the drafting conversation faster, not to substitute for it.
How accurate is the scoring?+
The scoring engine is fully deterministic. Each question maps to documented weights derived from the patterns Irish solicitors and mediators identify as the highest-risk pre-incorporation gaps. There is no generative AI in the scoring path.
Can our firm white-label this?+
A white-label option is on the roadmap and we are working with a small number of design-partner Irish firms. Please get in touch via the partnership form below.
Can solicitors refer clients directly?+
Yes. We provide named referral links and, on request, a short PDF founders can be given at the end of an initial call.
How is founder data protected?+
Hosted in the EU, encrypted in transit and at rest, no profiling, no resale, and full export or deletion on request. PartnerReady is GDPR compliant by design.
PartnerReady exists to make difficult founder conversations happen before they become expensive legal disputes.
If you advise Irish founders, we would value a conversation about how a structured pre-incorporation diagnostic could fit into your firm's workflow.