Practical notes

The occasional note.

A few times a year, one genuinely useful thing about getting your legal footing right — dry, practical, no selling. Discrete notes, in keeping with how the practice works: read the one you need, keep it, move on. Past notes are below; leave your email to get the next one.

Note 01 · For business owners

The clause your customer’s purchase order quietly changed

Here is a trap that catches good businesses. You send a quote on your terms. The customer sends back a purchase order on theirs. You start the work. Months later something goes wrong — and it turns out the contract was on the customer’s terms all along, because in a “battle of the forms” the law generally treats the last set of terms sent and accepted before performance as the ones that govern.

The fix costs nothing: put your terms in front of the customer before the contract is made, refer to them on every quote and order acknowledgement, and do not simply sign the customer’s purchase order without a thought. Well-drafted terms sitting in a drawer protect no one; it is the deploying of them, on every order, that does the work. If you are not sure whose terms currently apply to your sales, that is worth ten minutes of a barrister’s time before it becomes worth rather more.

Note 02 · For anyone with a will

“I’ll sort it later” is the most expensive sentence in estate planning

Two things quietly undo more estates than any tax rule. The first: marriage automatically revokes an earlier will, so the couple who made mirror wills, then married, may both be intestate without knowing it. The second: an LPA cannot be made once capacity has gone — only before. People treat both as things to sort out later, and “later” is precisely the moment they stop being possible.

Neither costs much to put right while you still can. Review your will after any marriage, divorce, birth or death; and make your lasting powers of attorney while you are well, not when you need them, because by then it is a slow, costly Court of Protection application instead. If your will predates your marriage, or you have no LPA, those are the two calls worth making before the easier ones.

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