Contract law and contract management training

Michael Rourke

partner & LEAD CONTACT

• London, Southampton
• corporate, commercial
• m.rourke@hempsons.co.uk
• 020 7484 7648

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The corporate commercial team at Hempsons includes contract specialists (what you are getting), procurement specialists (how you get a contract as a public body) and commercial litigators (what happens if the contract does not entirely go to plan). We help guide our clients on contracting projects of all sizes and complexities.

Hempsons’ corporate commercial team’s contractual work over the last 12 months has involved some notable large scale projects and cases covering the full spectrum of contract negotiation, procurement and termination. We have advised on:

• successfully defending a decision to exclude a late bidder from a procurement
• termination of substantial contracting arrangements
• dissuading numerous potential challenges to procurement processes (asserting unfairness in process or a lack of transparency, or other technical challenges to process) by unsuccessful bidders through pre-action correspondence
• collaboration arrangements across providers for the delivery of services
• contractual reviews of substantial long term contracts to ensure the terms being entered into protect our client’s interests

Contracts are often complex and can be difficult to understand. This is not a deliberate intention of the lawyers when drafting them, we want them to be understood and clear, especially the provisions which protect our client’s interests. Ambiguous contractual drafting is often the cause of disputes, and drafting which is not understood (even if clear) can have unexpected results for clients.

In our experience a number of trends and issues reoccur in our instructions which we have developed into a two hour training session for public sector contracts managers and procurement officers who develop, scrutinise and approve the contracts your organisations enter into. The session covers some back-to-basics refresher training together with some more advanced training on drafting individual clauses, such as key performance indicators. The session finishes off covering the repeat offender clauses which rolling contracts and extension, limitation of liability and indemnity provisions and variation mechanisms.

If your organisation would benefit from refresher training on contractual matters we would be pleased to discuss this with you.