Frankenstein’s Contract: The monster tearing apart your business.

Now be honest, have you at some point spent hours scouring the internet for free snippets of different legal clauses and sewn them all together haphazardly into a single, mismatched contract? Have you unwittingly made … ‘Frankenstein’s Contract’?!

Don’t worry, lots of people do it - probably because they can’t be bothered with the cost and hassle of instructing a lawyer to do it. Fair enough. But have you really thought about what lurks beneath all of that legal jargon and how it might affect your next business dispute?

Sticking with the theme, one of my clients had a real horror story years ago when they made a DIY plant hire contract off the internet and sought to rely on it following a major incident costing about £20,000. Most of the contract was passable but unfortunately the client hadn’t realised that they had copied an Australian contract and the jurisdiction clause required that all disputes be settled by - you guessed it - the courts of Australia (Victoria State specifically)! Oh dear. Apart from the possible upside of a nice break in Australia, this was a major and potentially costly issue.

Thankfully, following our instruction we managed to get a resolution which didn’t require us all to pack our bags… but the story could have ended very differently for that small business. This is just one of many cases where a DIY contract has generated more problems than it solves in the long run, including unplanned, additional legal fees at a time when the client least needs it.

The take home message is not to underestimate the importance of having a coherent and robust contract in place before things go south. A contract where you know what everything does and why it’s in there. You may never need it, but sod’s law says that anything that can go wrong will; are you willing to take the chance? Frankenstein’s Contract can only do so much before it eventually turns on you and your business!