Contracts

Written Agreements Are Not the Final Word

Recently, an Ohio appellate court held that the parties' actual conduct — and not the express written provisions in their lease to the contrary — controlled in interpreting the intentions of the parties in contracting. This case serves as a good reminder for legal practitioners that our written agreements are often not the final word.

The reasonable and typical middle ground in the struggle between the parties regarding the scope of the "exclusive" is to protect only a tenant's "core" or "primary" business. Using such an approach, if properly drafted, will allow the tenant to avoid the two-coffee-shop situation, but will still permit the landlord to lease to multiple tenants with overlapping but not fundamentally competing uses.

Three Goals

A recent report laid bare one of the most pressing problems of today's companies — and their GCs. Simply put, the report found that businesses of all types do a poor job of contract management.

Non-compete clauses in employment contracts typically seek to preclude employees from working for a competitor for a specific period of time and within a specific geographic area. Most states allow non-competition agreements, provided they are reasonable in scope and justified by the employer's legitimate business interests. California, however, generally prohibits covenants not to compete, subject to limited exceptions.

Most divorces involve the transfer of a marital residence between the parties as part of equitable distribution, especially when there are minor children who will continue to reside in the family home.There is a transfer tax payable on the transfer of real estate, including the marital residence, in connection with the implementation of the marital settlement agreement or divorce.

Compensation provisions in entertainment contracts are in one or two subparagraphs. To simplify drafting and to use “plain English,” the compensation provisions often contain introductory, governing language along the lines of: “In full and complete consideration for entering into and performing all of the terms hereof.” However, is such a “plain English” approach always a “best practice”?

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided that an agreement between a book author and a publisher allowed a customer of distributor Barnes & Noble to retain a sample of the book in the “digital locker” the distributor provided to the customer.