When the departing person holds a directorship, the exit acquires a second dimension: corporate mechanics — resignations, filings, company documents — and a second audience: the market, the register, and everyone who reads both. The clean director exit handles the mechanics and the narrative together, inside the settlement — because sequenced separately, each can damage the other.
The Mechanics, Papered Properly
The settlement agreement for a director-employee should deal with the whole person: the resignation itself — from the board, from subsidiary boards, from any officerships — documented in agreed form, effective on agreed dates, rather than left to a heated letter or an assumed implication; the filings — the company’s obligations to record the change handled on the agreed timeline, since the public register will tell its own story and the date it tells should be the agreed one; company property and access — positions, signatories, mandates and systems unwound in terms; ongoing obligations — a former director’s duties don’t all evaporate at the door, and the agreement should be candid about what continues; and protection both ways — the departing director’s position on matters decided while they served, addressed rather than ambient. Where shareholdings sit alongside the directorship, the exit compounds again — that terrain adjoins the firm’s company practice at companysolicitor.ie, and the pieces are run as one file, not three.
The Announcement Choreography
Senior departures are read — by the market, by clients, by the next employer’s board — and the reading is shaped or it shapes itself: the agreed announcement in text, internal and external versions, timed against the filings so the register and the narrative say the same thing on the same day; the framing chosen deliberately — “stepping down to pursue”, “planned transition”, the words that will be quoted — and repeated consistently across announcement, reference and LinkedIn choreography, because inconsistency is what sophisticated readers notice; mutual non-disparagement binding the organisation’s officers regarding statements about you, since senior worlds are small and conference-margin editorialising travels; and the whole architecture per the references and announcements page, negotiated while goodwill is being purchased rather than retrofitted after. This is standard executive-tier work — and it’s the half of a director’s exit value that compounds longest.
The sequencing rule: nothing resigns, files or announces until the settlement is agreed — the resignation offered in dignity before terms are settled is leverage donated, and the filing that precedes the narrative lets the register speak first. One agreement, one timeline, everything moving together.
A directorship inside your exit? One file, run properly: 01 5827148.