Contract Law for Business

Contract Law for Business

OBJECTIVES:

By attending this seminar, you will:

1. Gain practical experience of effective contract negotiation
2. Grasp the main issues impacting the early phase of offer and acceptance
3. Learn how to create a formal contract
4. Understand the legal background to common contract terms
5. Identify and understand the role of payment and performance obligations
6. Discover how to limit risk and identify the areas of potential claims
7. Examine ways to skilfully avoid disputes
8. Determine how to deal with and make defences to breach of contract
9. Get-to-grips with EU competition law and its impact on business contracts
10. Study some typical business agreements

Course Outline:

Effective contract negotiation:

• Preparing for negotiation
• Developing winning strategies
• Understanding the rules negotiation and culture
• Improving your communication skills
• Mapping routes to agreement

Offer and Acceptance:

• Defining the number of offers that can be on the table at any time
• Understanding what is a counter offer
• Examining what constitutes acceptance

Tools, techniques and terminology when creating a formal contract:

• Informal contracts
• Standard terms
• Letters of intent
• Memorandum of Understanding
• Enforceable contracts

Getting to grips with how the law changes what you thought you had agreed to:

• What are implied terms and where do you use them
• Working within government restrictions
• What is good faith and making it benefit your organisation
• Misrepresentation
• International convention

Implications of law and regulations for international agreements:

• Incoterms
• Personnel
• Price and payment terms
• Disputes
• Exporting

Termination – Understanding how and when contracts end:

• Duration
• Liquidation
• Change of control

Successfully resolving contractual disputes:

• Drafting key provisions to minimise the risk of disputes
• ADR clauses
• Arbitration – institutional or ad hoc

The impact of EU competition law:

• What the rules say
• Prohibited agreements
• Areas to watch – pricing; quantity restriction
• Market sharing; public procurement rules; joint buying & selling
• When the rules apply – De Minimis
• Horizontal and vertical agreements
• The role of the Block Exemptions

Some typical agreements

This topics will review the terms and conditions of some typical agreements to illustrate how to avoid the legal pitfalls and challenges faced:

• Service
• Supply
• Manufacture
• Licensing

PRACTICAL WORKSHOP: Drafting and understanding boilerplate clauses:

• General provisions
• Confidentiality
• Costs
• Assignment
• Notices
• Law of the contract

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

• Contract managers and engineers
• Commercial managers
• Sales and marketing managers
• Project managers

And all those involved in the negotiation, drafting and management of commercial business contracts