Although there are a number of pitfalls with letters of intent, the key risk is that the full contract is never signed. A letter of intent is used to get the project started quickly, but it is only intended to be a temporary stop-gap. So why don’t the parties get
A letter of intent is a contract to start a construction project in the form of a letter. It may also confirm the sender’s intention to award the contract for the whole project to the recipient – the contractor. The purpose of a letter of intent is two-fold: (1) to
Everyone prefers plain language – your clients expect and want it from their advisers, their business partners, their regulatory authorities and also from their lawyers. But the skills to write plainly are uncommon, and the tools and techniques need to be learnt and practiced (and bad habits erased). Bad Habits
When writing your contract, you may be tempted to see it as a form of safety-net. Rights and remedies… This means your contract will inevitably focus on what will happen when things go wrong. Is this really a good start to a client relationship? How do you think it makes
Do you have a ‘haphazard’ or ‘cavalier’ approach to the terms of your contracts? Back in 2011, the OFT found evidence that contract users did not “properly assess the transaction or deal they enter into.” It is not a luxury to make sure your contract helps you do business, and
A good speech is like a skirt – it should be short enough to be interesting and long enough to cover the essentials… Churchill The same is true of a good contract. Short enough to be read. Long enough to cover the essentials. In the construction industry, we have (2018)
Contracts are tools to help you do business, and in that sense, you (rather than a lawyer) might be the perfect person to write your own contract. This might seem counter-intuitive coming from a contract specialist, who helps companies to write their own contracts. When I work with clients, I
There is no point deciding to write a contract until you have decided it’s purpose. What is your contract meant to do? Here are some suggestions: Create trust You may decide that your contract should create or enhance trust between you and your contract partner. Your contract acts as a
“To be clear is to be efficient; to be obscure is to be inefficient. Your style . . . is to be judged not by literary conventions or grammatical niceties but by whether it carries out efficiently the job you are paid to do.” As the author of the 500
Many people choose a construction contract not for its cost, nor for its fine words, but for their familiarity with the terms and conditions. Although one of the shorter standard forms, what if we could condense NEC… what should it say? No précis of NEC3 could omit its principal feature: