Capturing Business Transitions Through the Lens: A Visual Exploration of Business Transfer Agreements

This Blog post has been created by lawyers to give you a general idea of business transfer agreements. The information is not intended to be comprehensive.

The phenomenon of visual storytelling through photography and the business agreement process may seem worlds apart-but in fact, they share a fundamental connection: the ability to encapsulate the essence of a process and arrive at a deeper understanding of how things came to be.

I met an artist recently who was exhibiting some of her works in a Winnipeg restaurant. I was struck first by the titles of her pieces, then by their subject matter. She had actually used the word “artisanal”! She had seen a connection between craft beer brewing and visual storytelling; the synergy between these seemingly different activities was so intuitive that she had felt compelled to represent the two with her photographs.

So much of what we think we know about legal matters is based on our encounter with technical words on the page, particularly in contracts. I was intrigued by the concept of comparing a complex legal process with an interpretive visual image. How would a business transfer agreement look if it were turned into a piece of artistic visual storytelling?

What do I mean by business transfer? A business transfer agreement is a contract that reflects the desire of one party to make a business transfer-generating revenue from a business to another party. It will be governed by principles of sales law and can be structured in numerous different ways. Here are a few examples of the various items that can be transferred: Real estate property, also known as immovable property, is viewed as a type of asset and becomes movable upon transfer. For real estate properties, the exchange generally involves money for the transfer of real estate. When products or goods are purchased, a contract is made by the buyer of the product or goods and the seller of the product or goods. Both parties can be private persons, private corporations or government agencies. The buyer and seller are both exchanging items that hold monetary value-the seller is transferring ownership of his/her product or goods to the buyer. The rights and obligations of the parties involved must be definite and agreed upon. The entire contract should be executed in conformity with these laws.

Artistic photography aims to tell a story, connect with an audience, or generate a strong emotive response. It always has a subject matter, and when we apply that to the concept we started with: a business transfer agreement, we immediately create a photograph of the business transfer agreement format. It’s become visual storytelling. A photographer will be able to capture the concept of the business transfer in the above formats-real estate, personal property, goods and services, and shares/corporate assets.

By connecting the dots between the business transfer agreement format and visual storytelling, not only did we engage in a collaboration between a visual artist and the law, but we engaged the significant component of a visual storyteller: the narrative of making sense of the complex details of a legal document. Getting images for the complex pieces of the puzzle that make up a business transfer agreement format will require a lot of consideration on the part of the photographer, most notably, an understanding of the profound relationship between the various pieces of the puzzle.

Here are some examples of visual storytelling that have been created to illustrate a post; an explanation that helps to make sense of the changes that have been made.

Another example of visual storytelling is the use of narrative to show how to distinguish international law:

What we witness in the above images is correlation between the photographs and the text of the blog post. It becomes clear that some of the pieces of the business transfer agreement format can be represented in visual pictures-in ways that may not have been applied previously in a completely novel way. We realize, in fact, that there is a gap between the language of the document and the practical sense of what it means for the stakeholders of the business transfer process.

What we’re witnessing is the translation of a paper contract into visual storytelling/artistic photography. It’s not merely a transfer of the document to the photographer to be interpreted in another form. It’s in fact a collaboration between a visual storyteller (the photographer) and a visual storyteller (the lawyer), where just as in jazz, the visual storyteller interprets it his/her own way and that interpretation becomes the piece of art in the end.

And so, just as the business transfer agreement format becomes visual storytelling through shared representation with other visual storytellers, it makes sense that as lawyers, we can make sense of all of this legal stuff through visual storytelling too.