Building Europe’s Venture Capital Market: Contractual Transplants, National Challenges, and the Road to a Pan-E.U. Regime

There is nowadays a growing consensus in academic and policy circles that regulating corporations, financial institutions, and markets ideally postulates a truly interdisciplinary approach. The DFG LawFin Center supports the quest for fruitful interdisciplinarity by gathering economists and legal scholars for a critical discussion of each other’s work. As part of its mission, the LawFin Center organizes interdisciplinary workshops that will serve as a forum for discussions regarding topical challenges. 

Together with ECGI, the DFG LawFin Center at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and the Department of Legal Studies at Bocconi University are organising: The Fifth LawFin Workshop:

"Building Europe’s Venture Capital Market: Contractual Transplants, National Challenges, 
and the Road to a Pan-E.U. Regime”

U.S. venture capital (VC) contracts have shaped transactional practice worldwide, including in Europe. Yet their transplantation into many European jurisdictions has been fraught with challenges, producing inefficiencies that threaten the growth of a vibrant VC market. The E.U. is now striking back with an ambitious solution: a new “28th regime” for startups, designed to give investors and entrepreneurs far greater freedom to define their governance through private ordering.

Timed just before year-end, this workshop will dive into the academic and policy debates around Europe’s corporate law dysfunctions and the imminent launch of this pan-European regime. It offers a timely forum as obstacles to efficient VC contracting become sharper and new regulatory frameworks emerge in response.

The program will combine academic analysis with policy debate. Three research papers will be presented and discussed, followed by a policymaking-oriented roundtable with representatives from EU institutions, academia, and the European VC and entrepreneurial ecosystem. The session will run for approximately three hours. 

This workshop is the first in a global seminar series on the law and finance of private equity and venture capital. Upcoming events will broaden the lens. These will include a seminar on “U.S. Venture Capital Contracting Goes Global: Perspectives from Asia and Latin America,” which will take place at the end of the winter, and another seminar on “Legal Culture and Private Ordering: What Can VC Contracting Teach Us?,” which will unfold in 2026. This series will chart how VC contracting practices travel across jurisdictions, with the ambition to ultimately understand how the interplay of law and informal norms shapes one fundamental pillar of the architecture of innovation finance.