Contract Law Archives - Page 2 of 3 - SEQ Legal

Many websites are aimed at children, and many that aren’t aimed at children are used by them.  Although not all website operators seek to enter into contractual relationships with users, many do; and there lies a problem.  The general rule of English law is that individuals under 18 years of age – minors in the […]

This checklist is designed to help those new to software development agreements ensure that they have considered the principal issues that a typical agreement should cover.  It also provides a little guidance as to the different approaches to some of the issues. I have categorised each issue under one of these headings: the software design […]

The first thing I learnt as a trainee lawyer is that the parties to a contract should be properly and unambiguously identified.  I spent the next few years learning that non-lawyers routinely elide this principle – to the benefit of no-one, except lawyers. Consider the following contractual parties clause. This agreement is made on XXX […]

The success of most contract negotiation processes can be measured by: the quality of the resulting contract, in terms of faithfulness to the parties’ intentions, proportionality, certainty and clarity; the length of the process and the costs incurred during the process; and the resulting attitudes of each party with respect to the contractual documentation and, […]

Should you include an indemnity in your IT contract?  And if so, what sort of indemnity?  Indemnities in IT contracts come in many different shapes and sizes.  Whether it is appropriate to include an indemnity in a given contract will depend upon a range of factors.  In this post, I explore some of these factors. […]

Contractual caps on the liability of a business must usually be reasonable if they are to be enforceable under English law.  There are various tools the courts use to control liability caps, but the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 is probably the most important.  UCTA applies to most business contracts, but there are exceptions (e.g. […]

So, you’ve got a new website.  You’ve got some T&Cs and a policy or two.  What now?  What should you do with your legal documents?  How should the documents be incorporated into the website? It would be nice if there were simple answers to these questions.  Something like: you should do X with your T&Cs […]

In the real world, individuals and organisations are constrained in all kinds of way, and such constraints may affect their ability to meet their contractual obligations.  For instance, a business may wish to complete a project for a client by a particular date, but all kinds of external factors – changes to specification, staff absence […]

How many legal documents should a website include?  This depends to an extent upon the nature of the website, but just as important are the inclinations of the website operator. Where possible, I try to limit the legal documents to two: a terms and conditions document and a privacy policy. The privacy policy is kept […]

What is the difference between an exclusive grant of rights and a non-exclusive grant of rights? Is there any difference between an exclusive grant and a sole grant? In this short post, I try to answer these common contract-related questions. Many types of commercial contract feature the grant of rights by one person or company […]