BUSINESS LAW
commercial contracts
Doing business means having contracts with customers and suppliers. Good contracts reduce everyone's risk and make sales and procurement easier.
- Standard T&Cs or bespoke agreements
- B2B and consumer contracts
- E-commerce
- Service agreements
- Distribution, reseller and franchise agreements
- Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)
standard terms and conditions
Contracts are at the heart of all business transactions. Every time you sell to a customer or buy from a supplier, you are making a contract, whether it’s oral or in writing.
The idea behind standard terms is simple enough: it’s your business deal written down. Your lawyer should understand everything in your T&Cs, of course. But so should you and your customer – the T&Cs describe what you are selling and they are buying from you.
Plain English Law writes standard terms of business using everyday business language wherever possible:
- Sale of goods
- Terms of service
- SaaS and API access
- Consumer terms
- E-commerce
negotiations and bespoke contracts
Standard terms won’t be appropriate for every deal.
Sometimes the transaction is too complex to fit a pre-set business or service model. Sometimes your customer wants to negotiate something different to you standard offer, or your supplier offers you terms that are unfair or shift too much risk.
We help small and mid-sized businesses businesses find pragmatic solutions to:
- Complex or high-value transactions
- Outsourcing
- Research and development (R&D) collaborations
- International deals
- Joint venture agreements
Intellectual property licensing
Two forms of intellectual property (IP) come up repeatedly in business dealings: copyright and trademarks.
IP can frequently become a flashpoint when:
- You’re using someone else’s
- Someone else is using yours
Often it’s fine to use someone else’s IP in your business — you just need their permission. (Normally, you would get permission by signing a licence agreement or another contract with licensing clauses.) However, using IP without permission is both wrong and risky, putting your business at significant financial and reputational risk.
On the other hand, imagine what happens if you discover somebody else is using your IP — a logo you’ve designed, for example — to help build their business without your permission?
We can help identify potential issues, and negotiate contracts to get the most out of your IP, and secure licences to use others’ IP where needed.
And we’ll use straightforward plain English to create the contracts you need to protect yourself — at either end of the IP transaction.
