Now that you have attended this session, what have you learnt?

I learned some things after attending a corporate law course. The seminar discussed contract law, international law, the constitution, and corporate law. During the lecture, I learned some new insights that would be useful in my career. In terms of contract law, I heard the following:
The seminar explored some of the simplest approaches to understanding a rundown of contract law terms. This provides step-by-step guidelines for keeping the company/organization trouble-free. About contract law, we also learned all the aspects of things that make contract enforceable and some of the critical terms that are needed to protect the company. This focused on step by step procedure of creating a legally enforceable contract.

We received important information about the certainty of terms by clearly defining the terms of the contract and the impacts of negotiations on such terms. There was a wide focus on the conditions that can lead to alteration of terms and conditions of the signed contract. The seminar discussed the several types of contracts and the types of agreements that can be used depending on the situation.

The seminar enlightened us on the different traps that can be faced by a company and how to deal with them. This included the standard form contracts, rollover contracts and battle of the forms. The deep focus into contract law enabled us understand the circumstances under which to use Memorandum of Understanding, Letters of Intent and Heads of Agreement. We learn the meaning of each term.

The seminar also explored how the international law shapes, regulates and informs decision making in the company. The seminar provides us with real life dilemmas to face the humanitarian actors, political decision makers and military personnel. The students are thus taught how to engage critically with variety of legal issues.

Now that you have attended the session, what measures can the company take to avoid or at least minimize some of the legal pitfalls?

There has been consistent legal challenge as pitfalls to the organizations and companies making them fall into legal traps. Some of the avoidable mistakes made by these companies include posting notices that go above threshold contracts. The most common pitfall in the public sector is to inaccurately classify opportunities. The other pitfall includes failing to clarify or clearly explain the duration or scope of projects.

In order to protect the company from such pitfalls, the company should take some simple steps and measures to minimize the impacts of such pitfalls to the company. Step one is to study up the changes among which, the buying organizations is mandated with the role of explaining why the contract is not split. This helps in application of full force of regulation and brings greater opportunities to negotiate tender process (George, 2004).

The second measure is educating the company’s stakeholders in order to stay up to date with changes to directives. Procurement stakeholders are encouraged to work with stakeholders to understand the requirements of the contract. The third measure is facilitating better communication and teamwork so that all departments of the company are involved in the procurement process (George, 2004). Commercial, finance, contract and legal departments need to work together in ensuring that contracts abide by the regulations and are legally sound.

The third measure to understand the goods produced by the company by carefully examining what is required in the procurement process. The companies thus should know when the contract should be renewed. Ability to specify contract terms by the company can help in avoiding mistakes in the final notice. Finally, it is important for the company to get help from the consultancy firms on matters of regulations. The company can gain extra reassurance through appointing consultancy to review notices prior to publication. This makes sure that the notices are compliant.

What should we do?

We should agree on a way to resolve the disputes that involve the company. This can be done by writing what the company and the other party can do in case something goes wrong. This will include handling disputes through mediation or arbitration instead of going to court.

Similarly, the company should agree on the circumstances under which the contract can be terminated. It makes sense if the parties can set the circumstances to terminate the contract (George, 2004). For example, if one party misses important time limits, the other party has full rights to terminate the contract without any legal breaching.















Reference

George J. Emerg. (2004). It’s only as good as the people. Retrieved July 9, 2017

from https//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15062506/