U.S. Venture Capital Contracting Goes Global: Perspectives from Asia and Latin America

A growing consensus has emerged in academic and policy circles that regulating corporations, financial institutions, and markets ideally postulates a genuinely interdisciplinary approach. 

The DFG LawFin Center supports the quest for interdisciplinarity by organizing events that can serve as a forum for discussions regarding topical themes. 

The 6th LawFin Workshop - the second in the series jointly organized with the Department of Legal Studies at Bocconi University and under the sponsorship of ECGI - will focus on: 

"U.S. Venture Capital Contracting Goes Global: Perspectives from Asia and Latin America"

U.S. venture capital (VC) contracts are widely described as the global baseline for startup governance. In practice, however, U.S. labels are often attached to provisions that operate differently—or are functionally replaced—once they meet local institutional environments.

Building on the first workshop’s discussion of VC contracting under European legal regimes, this event turns to VC contracting in Asia and Latin America to examine what VC deals look like and how they work in practice. The goal is to move beyond high-level claims of convergence and offer a granular account of contractual form versus contractual function. A further focus is whether, and how, market participants “contract around” domestic constraints through offshore holding-company structures and other bypassing techniques—potentially making local corporate law less binding in practice for the startup ecosystem.

The program will combine academic analysis with a practitioner- and policymaker-facing discussion focused on cross-border structuring techniques and their implications. Three research papers will be presented and discussed, followed by a roundtable with representatives from academia, the VC and entrepreneurial ecosystem, and the legal profession. The session will run for approximately four hours.

This workshop is part of a global seminar series on the law and finance of private equity and VC. The series charts how private equity and VC contracting practices travel across jurisdictions, with the ambition of understanding how the interplay of law, enforcement, and informal norms shapes a fundamental pillar of the architecture of innovation finance. The first event in the Bocconi–LawFin–ECGI VC contracting workshop series—“Building Europe’s Venture Capital Market: Contractual Transplants, National Challenges, and the Road to a Pan-E.U. Regime”—was held on 4 December 2025. Subsequent events will focus on, inter alia, “Private Equity and Venture Capital Funds across the Globe” and “Legal Culture and Private Ordering: What Can VC Contracting Teach Us?”.

📆 Conference details: 
Lecture date and time: Wednesday, 18 March 2026 | 13:30 – 18:00 CET
 

📍Conference location: Zoom