Advice on content and drafting terms of business

The terms and conditions upon which a business operates are often given a low priority by companies and may only be given detailed consideration when a dispute arises, by which time it may be too late. In the meantime, the sales department may, without the knowledge of the legal department, be issuing quotations or processing orders using terms which are out of date, unsuited to the company's current business needs or simply copied from terms used by the company's competitors. If sales staff are not following proper contracting procedures, they may sometimes not even be contracting on the company's own terms, because better-trained purchasing departments have succeeded in substituting their own.