Foreign representation

Standing you do not yet have

Entering an unfamiliar jurisdiction, the hardest thing to acquire quickly is standing. Not a registered entity or an office — those are administrative. Standing is being someone the relevant people will take a meeting with, and whose word is treated as reliable.

Without it, an organization spends its first eighteen months talking to people who cannot decide anything, forming a picture of the environment from whoever was willing to talk, and making commitments based on that picture.

What representation means here

We act for governments and companies in jurisdictions where they have no presence and no established relationships. In practice that involves:

• Reading the environment accurately. Who holds real authority, which relationships matter, where the genuine constraints sit as opposed to the stated ones, and what the political calendar will permit.
• Opening the right doors. Introductions carry weight only when the person making them has something to lose by making a bad one. That is the position we occupy.
• Representing the position. Presenting a client's case in terms that make sense in the local context — which frequently means restating the same proposition entirely differently to be heard the same way.
• Holding the relationship between visits. Relationships in most of the world are maintained continuously, not quarterly. Someone has to be present between the trips.

The cultural and geopolitical layer

A great deal of what blocks foreign entry is not written down anywhere. It is historical, cultural, and often specific to the particular institution rather than the country. A proposal that fails in one ministry may succeed unchanged in another because of something that happened a decade ago.

Working through those roadblocks rather than around them is the point of this practice. Around them is usually where projects go to stall.

Confidentiality

Representation work is conducted discreetly by default. Where an engagement requires disclosure of who we act for, that is agreed in advance and in writing. Where it does not, we do not disclose it — including on this website.