Review your funding terms before you accept the grant

Grant agreements often do much more than confirm the funding amount. They can set detailed rules about how money is spent, what records must be kept, when reports are due, who owns project outputs, and when funds may need to be repaid. For charities, associations and social enterprises, those obligations can affect governance decisions and day-to-day operations long after the grant is accepted. A legal review helps you spot terms that may be unrealistic, unclear or risky before your organisation commits itself to them.

The clauses that usually need the closest attention are the permitted use of funds, milestone and reporting obligations, audit rights, repayment or clawback wording, default triggers, termination rights, intellectual property, publicity permissions and record-keeping requirements. Some agreements also include controls around subcontracting, changes to project scope, board approvals or how unspent funds are handled. These points can have real operational consequences, especially where the project involves staff, volunteers, partner organisations or deliverables that continue beyond the initial funding period.

The review depends on the agreement itself and on how your organisation is set up and plans to deliver the funded project. We may need to know whether you are a charity, incorporated society, trust or social enterprise, whether members or a board need to approve certain commitments, and whether the project involves third-party delivery, shared IP, or sensitive information. That context matters because the same clause can create different risks depending on how your organisation operates in practice and who is responsible for meeting the grant conditions.

Sometimes internal review is enough for a very simple funding letter, but many grant agreements contain legal and operational wording that is easy to underestimate. A template checklist may not pick up how a repayment clause interacts with your project budget, or how an IP term affects materials created with partners or contractors. A tailored legal review looks at the actual agreement in front of you and explains where the document may create pressure points for your organisation, rather than assuming every grant arrangement works the same way.

The fixed-fee covers legal review of the agreement and advice connected to that review. It does not automatically include ongoing negotiation with the funder, project implementation support, technical rollout, or tax advice. If your organisation wants us to help with marked-up amendments, follow-up negotiation points or a broader governance review linked to the grant, we can discuss that separately. This page is aimed at the document review stage, where the priority is understanding what the agreement requires and what should be clarified before acceptance.

Just submit an enquiry via this page or click the 'get started' button on our website to submit an enquiry. After you've submitted an enquiry, one of our legal consultants will review your enquiry within 1 business day and get in touch to get a better idea of exactly what you are looking for.

Then your legal consultant will send through an email with a bit more information about the services you need, along with a fixed fee quote setting out costs, scope of the service and timing. Have a read through it, and if you're happy with the scope, you can accept and sign our engagement letter online - easy!

Once you've formally accepted, we'll connect you with a specialist lawyer and they will work with you to complete your project. They will contact you by email or phone if they need to get in touch.

Sprintlaw works on fixed-fee pricing wherever possible, so you can review the scope and cost before you decide whether to proceed. For the Grant Funding Agreement Review service, pricing starts from $900.00.

After you enquire, a legal consultant will confirm what is included, the expected timing and whether any extra work is needed before you engage us.

We operate completely online, which means we can help you wherever you are in New Zealand. We have office spaces in Sydney, and in Melbourne, but our use of technology allows our team members to work remotely from around the world. Our legal team are mostly based in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. We also have a London office for Sprintlaw UK.

Our legal team is made up of experienced lawyers, who are specialists in various areas of law and hold an Australian legal practising certificate. None of our Sprintlaw lawyers are New Zealand qualified lawyers and they do not currently hold a New Zealand practising certificate.

They provide legal services working remotely from Australia via our 'legal consultancy' model, through which (under section 6 and section 35 of the New Zealand Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006) our Australian legal team are permitted to provide legal services to New Zealand businesses provided they do not provide services in certain 'reserved' areas of law. You can read our FAQ page to learn a bit more about our 'legal consultancy' model.

Given the strong similarities between Australian and New Zealand law, and the areas of law in which we practice (being small business and startup law), we do not view the fact that our lawyers have not qualified in New Zealand as having any substantive impact on the quality of our service. We are committed to ensuring that we provide high quality, affordable legal services to all our New Zealand clients.

Our legal team have all trained at leading firms, but have left the traditional corporate law world to join us on our mission to create a new and better way of delivering legal services. They have specialist expertise in technology law, intellectual property law, contract drafting and review, corporate law and commercial law.