Gardner Leader

Contracts and Terms & Conditions

Commercial agreements are at the heart of any business, whether it is a simple agreement to sell an item in return for payment or a complex joint venture agreement. And yet many businesses fail to ensure that what has been agreed is properly recorded or that their contracts contain the appropriate protections.

Often this will not matter. Everyone does what is expected and the lack of a properly drafted agreement is not noticed.

But on other occasions, the parties have different ideas of what is expected of them and disputes arise over what their rights and obligations are. Or one party simply fails to perform and the remedies available to the other party are not clear. The result is usually a lengthy, time consuming and expensive dispute.

We help clients draft all kinds of agreements every day. That experience helps us to draw up contracts in clear language which set out what the parties want from their relationship and what is to happen if it goes wrong.

A well drafted agreement may not prevent a dispute arising, but it will make disputes less likely. The drafting process itself ensures that many issues, which might not have come up when the ‘headline’ terms were agreed, are considered and dealt with between the parties. How much better to resolve such issues at the outset by agreement? Legal issues such as competition law and unfair contract terms legislation, which might affect the validity of the agreement can be taken into account.

And where, despite all this, a dispute still arises, the agreement will provide a much better starting point for resolving it.

Agency agreements • Distribution agreements • Joint venture agreements • Long term supply agreements • Manufacturing agreements • Terms of sale & purchase

[Back]