05/01/23 – If you’re having a meeting or discussion with a third party which may involve you disclosing confidential information you should of course make sure that you get the third party to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Although the detailed terms of NDAs vary, they generally have two principal functions: to impose an obligation […]
Read more »29/11/22 – The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently published new guidance on email marketing and phone marketing. The guidance is supplementary to the ICO’s Guide to the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) and (124-page) draft Direct Marketing Code of Practice. Direct marketing is a fiddly area, with different rules depending on whether you’re using […]
Read more »09/11/22 – When I’m asked by a client to help with an invoice that they’ve been chasing without success, they assume the next step is for me to fire off a letter before action, ideally threatening fire and brimstone, and then issue legal proceedings. There are times when this is appropriate, but there are also […]
Read more »Issues to consider when drafting, reviewing or negotiating service levels include: Service levels Are uptime service levels measured monthly, or over a different period? (A 99.9% uptime service level measured monthly allows for a single outage of approx. 43 minutes; measured quarterly, that increases to more than two hours.) Are out-of-hours outages dealt with in […]
Read more »12/03/20 – The UK government has issued a Statement in response to the Law Commission’s report on Electronic execution of documents. My article on the Law Commission’s report can be accessed here. Key takeaways from the government’s Statement: The government agrees with the report’s conclusion that businesses and individuals can feel confident in using e-signatures […]
Read more »22/10/19 – The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has made a provisional finding that Fender Musical Instruments Europe Limited operated a policy between 2013 and 2018 which required online retailers to resell Fender’s guitars at or above a minimum price. This practice constitutes illegal resale price maintenance (RPM) under: The Chapter I prohibition of the […]
Read more »25/09/19 – Following a project focusing on uncertainties regarding the formalities around the electronic execution of documents, the Law Commission issued its report on Electronic execution of documents on 6th September 2019. Key takeaways: Electronic signatures can be used to execute documents, including where there is a statutory requirement for a signature. An electronic signature is […]
Read more »The phrase “subject to contract” should be used when you are negotiating what you expect may in the future become a binding contract, but not yet. So when negotiating a letter of intent or heads of terms, it is a useful way of making it clear that, although the key terms of the transaction are […]
Read more »If you are involved in negotiating commercial agreements, you are likely to have come across situations where either you or the other side is unwilling to agree to an absolute obligation (eg “the Distributor shall achieve sales of the Software of at least £1 million in the first 12 months….”), but agrees to use its […]
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