Corporate disputes have a cruel asymmetry: resolutions pass in minutes, registers change in days — and unwinding them takes years, when it’s possible at all. The injunction is company law’s pause button, and knowing when to press it is a discipline of its own.
The Irreversibility Triage
The strategic question isn’t “what are they doing wrong?” but “what’s about to happen that can’t be undone?” Injunction-urgent: share allotments diluting you below thresholds, transfers of the company’s core assets, the register changing, banking mandates altering — after-the-fact remedies unwind these badly or not at all, and quia timet principles reach the deal about to sign. Litigate-in-due-course: your removal as director is often better fought through the oppression and shareholder remedies that follow — unless it’s the gateway to the irreversible steps, in which case the gateway gets frozen too.
The Documents Decide
Half these battles were won or lost years before they started — in the shareholders’ agreement and constitution nobody has read since signing: the consent rights, the pre-emption provisions, the deadlock machinery, the valuation mechanisms. Read first, fight second — because the injunction restraining a breach of an agreement is vastly stronger than one restraining conduct you merely dislike, and because the same documents may authorise exactly what’s complained of. Deadlock cases add their own layer: restraining the company’s funds becoming one side’s war chest, while strategy serves the realistic endgame — one side buying the other out — rather than the siege.
The respondent’s corollary: served or threatened, don’t race the disputed act to completion — the race becomes their best evidence. And the undertaking as to damages runs both ways: applicants restraining transactions carry real exposure, and respondents should record restraint’s losses from day one. Full terrain: Company & Shareholder Injunctions.
A corporate act about to complete — or a motion just served? 01 5827148, at speed.