Why You Need to Review Your Business Contract

business people discussing work in office and looking at documents

Contracts are fundamental to objective business relationships. And they happen every day, from the smallest purchase to the largest partnership. The components are generally simple and easy to perform. However, the complexities of each party’s role tend to be where contracts can become seemingly arcane or confusing.

While everyone understands the need for a contract to be a requirement of how parties involved behaving, the exact execution and enforcement of a contract can vary depending on the words used. It is why folks need a Bucks County business attorney that  Olen Law Office provides.

What Should be in Your Contract

For a Bucks County business contract attorney, having a contract does not make your business in harmony. What should be in your business is critical.

Every contract should have an identification of the parties involved, their roles and expectations spelled out, providing the payment or consideration for each party to make the contract work, and contingencies if the contract terms do not work out as expected. Again, this sounds simple enough, but contracting can be very challenging in specific terms.

The most significant disputes in contracts tend to be on issues not directly addressed by the contract terms agreed upon. This is where experience can speak volumes. Many contracts start as commonplace language, including generic terms that cover the most common issues for a particular type of business.

For example, there is a boilerplate for real estate contracts just like there is one for a car sale or an equipment rental — these are the starting points. Every contract ideally needs tailoring to the specific needs of the immediate agreement, and that is where nuances happen a lot.

Experience fills in the gap, anticipating those issues that are likely to come up in a given business situation. The more of these issues covered, the better the contract will be in execution. Granted, the worst violation is someone breaking the contract entirely, the more significant arguments may arise over interpretations of ambiguous terms that are not clear enough to apply conclusively.

Contract Review: Your Attorney’s Role

A Bucks County business contract review attorney may start with a first layer review that confirms all of the minimum legal requirements placed in the contract draft. Again, that includes everything from the clear identification of the parties involved to the value they exchange in the contract to the obligations each party has to meet. An attorney also looks for specific limitations of the contract, including schedules, deadlines, restrictions on behavior, and recovery penalties.

The second layer of review goes deeper; this evaluation examines what is not addressed by the contract but represents a risk included and spelled out as a contingency. Experienced contract attorneys will highlight for you many of the issues they regularly see in disputes, advising how to head those off in a contract draft.

Remember, prevention is a far lower cost than damage recovery after the fact when things go wrong. In contract drafting, prevention of risk is a top priority and one of the fundamental reasons people put contracts in writing.

Final Contract Review Before Signing

Eventually, comes the moment of full execution, signing the contract to make it a reality. Even with negotiation, issues can slip through or exposures missed earlier can still happen. A legal review by a business contract attorney in Bucks County matters the most at this point because, once you signed the contract and made it legal, the point of changing anything has passed unless the parties mutually agree on an amendment after the fact.

Even with completed negotiations, making last-minute changes is still possible, which is why a legal review matters so much. Both fully understanding the obligations negotiated from the client’s perspective and noticing what will be necessary to complete the contract, the attorney can help you catch any issues that seem confusing or easy to miss due to subtlety. In short, this last phase is about risk management and going into the agreement eyes wide open.

The Olen Law Office can help with both contract drafting and review and post-signing compliance and renewals. As a business attorney Bucks County contract expert — the Olen Law Office allows businesses of all sizes to manage their partnerships and contractual needs every day. That kind of experience with a Bucks County business contract attorney pays dividends for new clients able to rely on Olen’s depth and experience as well as broad knowledge of business risk avoidance. Contact us today and let Olen Law Office protect your business by helping you from drafting to reviewing your contract.