Contract Simplification
November 4, 2003
I’ve developed a real thing about contracts with incredibly convoluted language. You’ve seen plenty of them — “if X and Y happens, then Z will occur, provided that A is true, and subject to the occurence of B, except that if C is also the case, then D will take place.” I confess to having been guilty of such crimes against language myself.
There is, however, a better way — several of them, actually.
Bye-Bye, Carolina; Hello, California
October 11, 2003
Late last month, a North Carolina customer of Oracle Corporation found itself involuntarily headed for California to pursue its lawsuit against Oracle. This came to pass because the customer — probably without even knowing it — agreed to a forum-selection clause when it bought its Oracle software license.
Backdated Sales Contracts Resurface Years Later
October 9, 2003
The CFO of software giant Computer Associates was forced to resign, along with two other senior financial executives of the company — and who knows what else now lies in store for those folks — because several years ago the company “held the books open” to recognize revenue for sales contracts signed after the quarter had ended.
According to CA’s press release of yesterday, in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2000, the company took sales into revenue in Quarter X even though the contracts weren’t signed until after the end of the quarter. See also these stories from Reuters, the AP, and Dow Jones.
(Continued below)
Surreptitious Contract Changes II
September 29, 2003
This weekend I posted a clause with a representation that no unmarked changes had been made to a contract, to provide a reasonable basis for signing the electronically-negotiated contract without reading the final hard copy. Today, in a very thoughtful commentary on his Corporate Law Blog, Mike O’Sullivan offers a more rigorous clause that contains both a representation and a warranty, “to also cover all redlining failures (intentional or unintentional) and to make it easier to reform the agreement under the doctrines of mutual or unilateral mistake:”
Surreptitious Contract Changes
September 27, 2003
It’s the end of the fiscal quarter, and so a lot of contracts are being negotiated. These days, most contract negotiations are done electronically. I email you a Word document. You email me a “redline” with revision marks and maybe some comments. We talk by phone. Repeat as necessary. In the end, however, we’re probably going to want a handwritten signature on a hard copy of the final contract.
Suppose I send you a signed original contract and ask you to countersign and return it. Do you do a word-for-word comparison, to make sure the hard copy matches the agreed electronic document? If you do, you’re spending time that surely could be put to better use. But if you don’t, how do you know I didn’t surreptitiously change something before printing the document for signature?
LOI Disclaimer Clause Rescues Investment Bank
September 24, 2003
Many letters of intent contain a clause stating that the parties do not intend to enter into a contract at that time and that neither party will be bound except by a final, formal, signed, written agreement. Earlier this month, such a clause rescued an investment bank from a lawsuit over a failed IPO.
Side Letter in Sales Deal Leads to SEC Fraud Suit
September 16, 2003
Last week the SEC announced that it had filed a civil lawsuit against a former Logicon executive who allegedly placed a $7 million order with Legato Systems that included a secret side letter giving Logicon the right to cancel its purchase. According to the SEC, the Logicon executive not only knew that Legato planned to fraudulently misstate its financial results, he even advised Legato’s sales people how to conceal the cancellation right from the Legato finance department.
LESSON: The SEC’s news release quoted Helane L. Morrison, District Administrator for the Commission’s San Francisco District Office, as saying, “Sales executives who book phony deals often rely on assistance from people who work for their customers. Today’s action highlights the Commission’s resolve to hold such persons responsible when they knowingly assist in fraudulent revenue recognition practices.”
Backdating Contracts Leads to Prison Term —
But It Can Be Entirely Proper
August 23, 2003
From the notes I took while getting ready to start this blog:
A former public-company CFO was recently sentenced to three and a half years in federal prison. His company, Media Vision Technology, had inflated its reported revenues, in part by backdating sales contracts. Because of the inflated revenue reports, the company’s stock price went up – until the truth came out, which eventually drove the company into bankruptcy. (We’ve all seen that particular movie in the past couple of years, eh?)
The judge noted that the CFO had an otherwise-exemplary record. If the new, stiffer penalties of the post-Enron sentencing guidelines had applied, however, the CFO likely would have faced more than 10 years in prison. (The Recorder, Apr. 8, 2003; see archived story.)
But backdating a contract is not necessarily illegal, depending on the circumstances.