Shareholder Disputes · Sydney & NSW
Have you been frozen out of your own company, starved of dividends, or are you dealing with a co-owner who has stopped acting in the company interest? With Law Flow you get a NSW solicitor with Supreme Court experience building your legal strategy, and AI reading the company record so the leverage is found early and the costs stay proportionate to the shares in dispute.
Is this you?
Any of these apply? A free 30 minute consultation to discuss your situation, identify apparent urgent deadlines and scope the next steps. Detailed advice may require document review. Call 0480 893 317 or request a call back.
Scope of work
These matters are about leverage long before they are about litigation. We build the evidence position first, then use it to drive the commercial outcome you actually want.
Time critical
Shareholder disputes reward the party who moves first with a documented case. Delay is rarely neutral, because the party in control of the company is usually the party in control of the record.
If you are being excluded, your access to accounts, email and minutes can disappear overnight. Documents should be secured before the other side knows you are taking advice.
A share issue, an asset sale or a new related party arrangement is far harder to unwind than to restrain. Acting before it completes is always the cheaper path.
Oppression is proved by a course of conduct. Contemporaneous records of each incident are worth considerably more than a reconstruction two years later.
Claims for breach of duty and for recovery of company property carry limitation periods. Older conduct can fall out of reach while you are still negotiating.
Lawyer-led, AI-assisted
Oppression cases are won on the paper trail. Years of board minutes, ledgers, bank statements and email threads have to be assembled into a pattern a court will recognise. Traditionally that work is the single largest line on the bill.
Thousands of pages of company records are scanned in a single pass to map payments, transfers and decisions into a timeline your solicitor can act on immediately.
Identifying the strongest three incidents early is usually what produces a settlement, and it avoids paying for a contested hearing to make the same point.
Strategy, negotiation and advocacy stay with a senior lawyer. The document mountain does not get billed at senior rates.
We use AI-assisted tools to support legal research, document review and initial drafting, with the work checked by the solicitor responsible for your matter. Combined with low office overheads, this helps us work efficiently and keep costs proportionate.
The time and cost involved depend on your matter’s complexity, documents and scope. We explain the proposed work and fees upfront, with fixed-fee options where the scope allows.
Tell us what you are dealing with and we will explain the proposed work and the fees before anything starts.
Book A ConsultationHow it works
A free 30 minute consultation with Tristan, Principal Solicitor, to discuss your situation, identify apparent urgent deadlines and scope the next steps. Detailed advice may require document review.
You get a written scope and a price for the next stage before any work starts. No open-ended retainer, no surprise invoices.
The documents, ledgers and authorities are processed at speed, then reviewed by your solicitor. This is the stage traditional firms bill hardest.
Advice, negotiation, drafting and advocacy are done by the lawyer with carriage of your file, and you deal with him directly throughout.
Cost
The commercial reality of a shareholder dispute is that legal costs can swallow the value in the shares. We scope in stages, and we say plainly when litigation is not worth running.
A free 30 minute consultation to discuss your situation, identify apparent urgent deadlines and scope the next steps. Detailed advice may require document review.
Initial strategy, records review and the letter of demand are commonly quoted as a fixed fee.
If court becomes necessary, each stage is quoted separately so spend never runs ahead of the value in dispute.
Your lawyer
Tristan Burt
Principal Solicitor
Tristan is the person who listens to your situation, understands your goals and builds the strategy. He is a NSW registered solicitor with years of experience from top-tier firms across Australia, Asia and Europe, and has built Law Flow’s AI systems to amplify his judgement, not replace it. He is the ultimate decision maker on your matter.
Common questions
Conduct that is contrary to the interests of the members as a whole, or oppressive to, unfairly prejudicial to, or unfairly discriminatory against a member. In practice it looks like exclusion from management, dividend starvation while salaries rise, denial of information, diversion of company opportunities, and share issues designed to dilute. It is generally a course of conduct rather than a single act.
A court can order that your shares be bought out at a value it considers fair, and that is the most common remedy in an oppression case. The practical work sits in establishing the conduct and then in the valuation, which is where these disputes are usually really fought.
Shareholders can apply under section 247A of the Corporations Act for a court order to inspect the books, and directors have their own inspection rights. A refusal to provide information is also evidence in its own right in an oppression claim.
Most shareholder disputes settle. Court is leverage rather than the destination. Our aim is to build a position strong enough that a commercial resolution becomes the sensible option for the other side, while being genuinely ready to run it if it is not.
Yes. Law Flow uses AI through business grade services under terms where client prompts, documents and outputs are not used to train or improve AI services. We add lawyer review, access controls, redaction tooling and restrictions on what can be submitted, consistent with the Law Society of NSW Statement on the Use of AI in Australian Legal Practice.
Next step
Thirty minutes with the solicitor who would run your matter. Bring the shareholders agreement and the last two years of accounts so we can discuss your situation and scope the next steps.
