What legal decisions should a startup make today to avoid problems tomorrow? How can it protect the value it is creating and prepare to scale and receive investment?
These were some of the questions we addressed in “Legal for Startups: From Idea to Funding Round,” a session we shared with the entrepreneurs of JBIZ Tank 2026, Olami JBIZ’s incubation and investment program, together with our colleagues at Kaplan Abogados.
The event brought together founders with innovative projects and concrete growth challenges for an exchange on legal tools for the different stages of their ventures.
Law as an Ally of Growth
At Lerman & Szlak, we support startups and technology companies from their earliest stages through fundraising, expansion, internationalization, and the consolidation of their business models.
We believe legal advice should keep pace with the business, helping entrepreneurs make strategic decisions, protect the value they generate, and anticipate contingencies, without slowing down innovation.
With this approach, together with Kaplan Abogados, we led a practical session organized around four pillars: corporate structure, founder agreements, preparing to receive investment, and protection of intangible assets.
María Cecilia Brazzola, partner at Lerman & Szlak, addressed one of the most important challenges for any startup: how to legally organize the relationship among its founders. She explained the importance of formalizing agreements among partners from the outset, defining ownership percentages (equity), establishing vesting mechanisms, and providing for what happens when a founder leaves the project. These decisions directly affect the company’s stability and its ability to attract investment.
Gabriela Szlak, also a partner at Lerman & Szlak, focused on the intangible assets that create value in startups and on the legal challenges of businesses built on technology, data, and artificial intelligence. She covered how to identify and design strategies to protect trademarks, software, technological developments, and know-how; how to ensure that intellectual property rights effectively belong to the company; and what startups should consider when using personal data, content, and technologies from third parties.
She also delved into the challenges posed by artificial intelligence: the rights over data and content used as input, the ability to exploit and protect the results generated as output, the terms of technology providers, and liability for how the solutions offered to the market perform.
One central message: it is not enough to create value. Companies need to be able to capture it, protect it, secure their rights, and enforce them against clients, partners, and investors, in order to build sustainable and scalable businesses.
For his part, Carlos Kaplan of Kaplan Abogados covered the selection of corporate structures and the instruments for accessing capital, including SAFEs and investment rounds.
Supporting Those Building the Businesses of the Future
JBIZ Tank is an Olami JBIZ initiative aimed at boosting startups led by young entrepreneurs from Latin America and Spain, connecting training, mentorship, investment opportunities, and a regional network of contacts.
For Lerman & Szlak, taking part in this initiative means much more than delivering a training session. Our commitment is to bring specialized legal advice to the participating startups and to the program itself, helping projects develop on solid legal foundations and prepare for their next challenges.
We especially want to thank Olami JBIZ and the JBIZ Tank 2026 organizing team for the invitation, the trust, and their work to promote entrepreneurial talent; all the participating startups, both in person and online, for their excellent questions and active participation; and our colleagues for their joint, collaborative work in preparing and delivering this event.
We are excited to be part of initiatives that connect talent, innovation, and growth opportunities.
