Contract Litigation
contract litigation
Contract Management Are you Feeling the Pain?
Procurement practitioners, legal counsel, contract managers and commercial managers are all feeling the pain caused by the Contract Management Problem.
Organisations expend a great deal of time, money, and effort, on negotiating, drafting and executing agreements every year. Once the contract is signed however, contracts are placed in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, and only come out when something goes wrong. By this time it is too late. This is the Contract Management Problem.
Contract Management is disparate and reactive, and no one in your organisation is typically accountable. So when something does go wrong, there is a lot of finger pointing and people playing the blame game.
Contract Management teams can still be disparate across your organisation, and this will depend on the nature of your business. By providing a central repository of contract information you are centralising contract data and documents, thereby providing access to information to those who need it, with delegation, and avoiding much of the data disconnect that can occur between disparate teams.
Legal teams are frustrated because they spend a lot of time and effort on negotiating favourable terms and conditions for your organisation, but there is a disconnect between signing the contract and ongoing management of these terms and conditions. The commercial side of the business is not managing the agreed terms effectively or holding suppliers to negotiated rates. The whole contract lifecycle needs to be managed.
Procurement teams are trying, often in vain, to provide group purchasing agreements that will save the organisation money. But their strategic role is not being supported operationally. Without visibility of agreements and preferred supplier catalogues, staff are ill-informed as to how to purchase and with which suppliers.
Commercial Managers and contract managers are trying their best to manage contract delivery, but cannot if they are not appropriately supported by the organisation from a systems point of view. Without contract management software system support, contract managers are only administrators. Systems, turn administrators back into contract managers and allow them to focus on the relationships they have built with their suppliers, rather than wading through spreadsheets.
So organisations continue to suffer increased costs due to the contract management disconnect, missed milestones, undelivered services, avoidable terminations and litigation, loss of corporate knowledge, and the errors caused by multiple data entry points.
About the Author
Adam McInnes is the CEO of Open Windows Contracts, a leader in contract management software. Open Windows offers a trial of their contract management software and additional material that you may be interested in.
How about contracts that are the heart of litigation in the real estate industry?
Agency issues are serious business in the real estate business and other arenas as well. How can you be an agent and not be an agent? Or, can you be an agent and not know you are an agent? Wheew! What a mess! How about contracts that are the heart of litigation in the real estate industry? Good, bad, indifferent, how do you tell them apart.
It is confusing. Each local has their own laws covering the forms. For example in Illinois the counties determine what is supposed to be in the RE contracts. The terms are gotten by looking at state and local law. For example the RE contract to sell a house in Chicago, is different from the contract to sell in DuPage county — the difference each locality has different laws.
As for how to determine who is the agent, that again is under state laws. Generally, there is a written contract between a buyer or a seller and a real estate professional. In the wording of the contract – let say between the seller of the house and the real estate pro who is listing the house, there is a clause that specifically says that this real estate pro is the agent of the seller. When a potential buyer comes to you to ask you about that house, even though you go ahead and show that potential buyer the house, you are legally the agent of the seller.
If you are a licensed real estate pro, go to your licensing body to get clarification of the rules for your state. If you are not licensed or studying to be, be very very careful about entering into any transaction -=– if your state requires a license.
The way you tell contracts apart, sometimes is by reading and re-reading until your eyes glaze over.
According to Development Plan Fails accusations fly as the broad support for developers is bitter opposition transformed the core of the unexpected implosion of one of the most ambitious development projects ever in the East Bay.