What's a Contract: General

WHAT’S A CONTRACT

This seems like such a basic question. Who doesn’t know what a contract is? However, much like all of legal, the answer is not so simple.

A contract has nothing to do with a signature. It doesn’t even have anything to do with a writing. The formal definition of a “contract” is “a legally enforceable agreement.” Sadly, this just opens the door to “what makes and agreement legally enforceable?”

Three things make an agreement enforceable:

• An Offer

• Acceptance

• Consideration

Takeaway/Client Notes

We will be giving each of the above three things their own blog posts, but some key takeaways are:

The first is that you can implicitly make an offer, and you can implicitly accept an offer through conduct. This might mean paying someone or doing something you wouldn’t have otherwise done, but for the agreement between you and someone else.

The second is sometimes you might enter into an agreement with no consideration. No consideration, no contract, even if an attorney prepared the document and everyone signed it. Consideration is hard to explain in one sentence, but it basically means that in order for someone else to bind you to something, you need to be giving them something they want, which you otherwise wouldn’t do in exchange. So, if someone makes you sign a one way NDA and you get no benefit from it, then you’re probably not bound to that NDA.