What you don’t know about… Contracts 📜

• Indemnification
• Warranty
• Breach
• Waiver
• Force majeure

… all things that are probably on your mind when you go speak to your attorney about your commercial contracts. 

And yet, that is not what most disputes are about. 

Why legal disputes happen

“Most contract disputes revolve around essential business terms such as scope, payment, delivery, and change management”. 

So explains Tanya Osensky, of Osensky Law. 

And while an attorney “can advise you on the right kind of indemnification”, they are not in a position to decide your “delivery terms, or how many widgets you are going to sell, or when payment is due”.

The most important part of your contracts

Speaking with Tanya I asked her: what is the most important information in a contract?

“Scope”, she told me, “where you define what you will be doing”. 

As in, who does what, who pays, when they pay, what is delivered, and by whom, and when, and more. 

“This should be the number one thing for business people to think through”. 

The most neglected part of your contracts

And yet… it is not.

Tanya shares the table below on her website. It shows the terms people spend the most time on, versus the terms that arise most often in disputes and disagreements. 

What to do about it

Take all the information that seems obvious to you and put it in writing. 

What you will do. 

When you will do it. 

What the other party will do.
When they will do it. 

And more. 

Once you are done, read through it and add more detail. 

With this information in place, then your attorney “can advise you on the right kind of indemnification”, etc. 

Because “the scope is the meat of the contract, everything else is the garnishes.”

What next

The information that is obvious to us can be hard to explain to others. Give me a call to work on laying out the exact scope of your services so your lawyer can truly help you out.

“The better this part is, the less likely you are to get to indemnity”