Drafting a franchise agreement

• (i) the contract is a technique for organising your network : we are interested first of all in you, in your profession, in the way you want to organise your relations with your distributors. For this, we listen to you and have designed exclusive digital tools to help you in your reflection and guide you in your choices. We are with you. We welcome you to discuss with you the choices to be made and help you decide by sharing all our experience of the franchise and your sector of activity. 
    

• (ii) the clauses of the contract must be clear and easily understandable, both for your future distributors or franchisees, who must understand the consideration and the reason, and by the judge who will be responsible for deciding the dispute to which the contract could give rise. This is to reduce the judge’s power of interpretation, which is a source of insecurity for companies. For these reasons, we have used legal design techniques to further improve the presentation of our contracts and their accessibility, without giving up any of our contractual management tools. We were assisted in this by one of the leading French legal design consultancies. 
    

• iii) the drafting of the clauses of the franchise agreement is worked out scientifically to ensure the greatest legal certainty: we have in-house litigators, based on our significant experience in distribution litigation, and franchise  in particular, and on a systematic analysis of case law (weekly cabinet review feeding an exclusive internal knowledge base); these clauses follow a validation process involving a law professor. 
    

Jean-Baptiste Gouache is the author of : 
  

• 8 LEXISNEXIS Jurisclasseur booklets, covering the entire franchise right ;  

• the fascicle of the permanent dictionary of business law “franchise law ” published by LEFEBVRE DALLOZ ; 
    

used as a documentary source by lawyers and corporate lawyers. Every year, we are the author of a reference column dedicated to franchise law in the Review of Competition and Consumer Contracts, which reviews all the case law in franchise law.  

He trains students of the law faculties of the Sorbonne and Aix-Marseille (M2 Concurrence Distribution) in franchise law.  

 
A good franchise agreement for a sustainable franchise network
    

The choice and quality of your franchise agreement will directly depend on: 
   

– the level of control of your franchise network (product image, price homogeneity, scope of points of sale); 

  – the promotion of the franchise network.  

We master the techniques of lease management associated with franchising, capital franchise, hotel franchise with management mandate and more generally all complex distribution arrangements implementing a franchise contract.  

Gouache Avocats’ distribution team is classified by Decision Makers as Must-Have in Franchise Law (the highest distinction in the ranking) and Must-Have in Distribution Law. We write the “Franchise Agreement” booklets in the documentation of one of the most prestigious legal publishers, Lexis Nexis.  

 
A multidisciplinary approach to building your franchise network

  Gouache Avocats can help you  master the profession of franchisor, by introducing you to recognized partners, also in their field:
   

This support is intended to allow you to master the profession of franchisor, a condition for the successful development of your franchise brand.  

 
At each stage, the materials delivered to you by our organizational consulting partner have been seen by Gouache Avocats, so that they do not expose you to unanticipated legal risks (example: your operating manual will not organize a price policy or an absolute territorial partitioning of the clientele). 
 
We provide you with a coordinated mission with all the partners, experts, most often members of the college of experts of the French Franchise Federation, as is Jean-Baptiste Gouache, who leads the team dedicated to franchise networks.  

Each year, Jean-Baptiste Gouache and his team intervene to draft or resume the drafting of 50 to 60 new franchise contracts. They have important benchmarks in all sectors of activity.