Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label terms and conditions

The BUSKLAW November Newsletter: Winning the "Battle of the Forms"

In my October post , we talked about the peril of a buyer ignoring the seller's "terms and conditions" in a sale of defective blueberries from Michigan growers. I suggested that the buyer could have prepared a "sales acknowledgment" to send to the seller along with the signed offer acceptance. This approach could have negated the seller's terms and conditions that contained numerous risk-shifting provisions skewing the deal in seller's favor. These provisions included restrictions that limited buyer's remedies if seller breached (which happened), mandatory jurisdiction and venue in seller's home town, and the requirement that the losing party in any court dispute pay the winning party's actual attorney fees, a provision that resulted in the buyer's payment of big bucks to the seller's lawyers.    Lawyers have an ominous name for this scenario: the "battle of the forms."  Generally, this battle occurs when contracting pa...

The BUSKLAW October Newsletter: Beware "Lurking" Terms and Conditions Incorporated Into Your Contracts!

( Author's Note: This post was first published in the 9/26/2016 edition of the Grand Rapids Business Journal  available here . But I've reproduced it for the sake of maintaining my newsletter's continuity and in case the link ever becomes unavailable. Also, the GRBJ didn't publish the neat wolfman graphic!) _______________________________ We all know that various beasties lurk about in October, the month of Halloween (Busklaw HQ is appropriately decorated), but beastly provisions can also lurk in contracts, ready to cause misery to the unwary. This is exactly what happened to a Massachusetts food distributor, Siegel Egg Company,  in a contract for the purchase of frozen blueberries from Naturipe Foods , the marketing arm of the Michigan Blueberry Growers, in a Kent County Circuit Court case (Naturipe Foods LLC v Siegel Egg Company, Inc).  In 2011, Naturipe submitted a written offer to sell a large quantity of frozen blueberries to Siegel in multiple shipment...