Leigh Ellis provides legal advice on IT business contracts, computer contracts, and contract disputes from offices in the City of London in England.
Terms of Business
The basic requirements for any business in the UK in terms of regulatory compliance are:
- Registration with the Information Commissioner;
- where personal data is dealt with by the business, a privacy policy that is publicly assessable;
- In B2C contracts, the Distance Selling Regulations and in B2B contracts, some provisions of the Electronic Commerce Regulations will apply. Where business is conducted online, there is an automatic right for a consumer to return the goods or cancel contracts entered into within 7 days, with very limited exceptions to the general rule. There are also detailed provisions for information to be provided in the Electronic Commerce Regulations.
There may other regulatory requirements that must be complied with, however it relies on the industry within which the business operates.
We receive many enquiries from business claiming that they are in dispute with another business, and there is no contract. When two businesses supply goods or services to another, there is always a contract in place – it is simply an oral contract whose terms are defined by the conduct and/or the precise words used by the parties. In the absence of written contract, recovery for defective goods or services, failures to deliver or failures to pay are more difficult to press and in many cases, uneconomical to do so. It is because a written contract records the terms of the agreement – that it may be produced as evidence of the agreement that was entered into. Be that as it may, all contracts, whether written or verbal, have terms implied into them that may only be excluded by agreement in B2B contracts.
For these reasons, properly drafted agreements avoid disputes. There is an art to ensuring that a contract meets the purpose for what it is intended. Many businesses opt for online contracts. These contracts tend to be drafted generically, so that they cover a broad range of circumstances, and they are good enough to achieve generic purposes. Contracts are about managing risk and allocating risk to the appropriate party, for say for instance breach of intellectual property rights.
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