Joint Venture Agreement
Two businesses combining effort on one defined venture.
An agreement between two or more separate businesses that collaborate on a specific project or venture while remaining independent companies, covering contributions, profit-sharing, governance, and an exit or wind-down process. It's the right structure when businesses want to combine efforts on one initiative without merging or forming a new joint company.
- Business days
- 1–5Business days
- Lawyer reviewed
- 100%Lawyer reviewed
- Surprise bills
- $0Surprise bills
What a Joint Venture Agreement should include
Purpose and scope — the specific venture, bounded so it does not swallow the parties' other business.
Structure — contractual or through a jointly owned entity, and why.
Contributions — what each party brings, including IP, people, capital and customers.
Governance — how decisions are made, and how deadlock is broken.
IP — what each party keeps, and who owns what the venture creates.
Exit — how a party leaves, how the venture is wound up, and who keeps what.
When you need one
When two businesses want to pursue something together that neither will do alone, and both are contributing more than money. If one party is simply buying services from the other, a services agreement is the simpler and more accurate document.
How Ruby drafts it
Tell us what you need
Describe the agreement, your business context, and how fast you need it. A few smart questions, not a legal questionnaire. Your price and turnaround are confirmed before anything starts.
Ruby drafts it
Once pricing is confirmed a qualified Ruby lawyer is assigned to your file, and the first draft is built from your answers and real Canadian statute.
A licensed lawyer reviews every line
A lawyer licensed in Canada reviews and finalizes the document before it reaches you, and writes the plain-language summary that comes with it.
Signed, stored, and yours to revisit
You get the final agreement and its summary, stored so you can come back to it rather than hunting through email for the current version.
The fee is set before any of that starts. Hourly billing moves as scope does; a flat fee is one number, confirmed in writing, that doesn’t change after the work is done. See how Ruby prices agreements.
Or did you mean one of these?
These get confused with a Joint Venture Agreement often enough to be worth ruling out before you buy the wrong document.
Questions people ask
A contractual joint venture is faster and easier to unwind. A jointly owned company gives cleaner separation of liability and a natural home for jointly created assets. The choice usually turns on how long the venture will run and how much it will own.
Only what the agreement says. This is the term most often left vague and most often fought over later, particularly where both parties contributed background IP that ended up combined.
A joint venture is usually limited to one defined project, where a partnership contemplates carrying on business together generally. Depending on how it is structured and how it operates, a joint venture can attract partnership-like treatment, which is a reason to be deliberate about the structure.
Looking for the plain definition rather than the document? See Joint Venture Agreement in the Ruby legal glossary.
This page is general information about Canadian business law and is not legal advice. Laws differ by province and change over time, and how they apply depends on your circumstances. For advice on your situation, speak with a lawyer licensed in your province.
Need a Joint Venture Agreement?
Ruby drafts it for a flat $1299 CAD, confirmed before any work begins, with a licensed Canadian lawyer on every document.