Mark Voigtmann, Baker & Daniels LLP
Articles
Legalities: 8 ugly contract clauses
Legal risks for automation industry companies: Add these ugly 8 contract clauses to the dirty dozen to get 20 very serious legal risks.
Legalities in automation: Know your project delivery method
It is important to fit the upcoming project into the right legal category. In automation terms, think of the project delivery method as the operating system, with the contracts or purchase orders being executable software. Each of these "operating systems" carries with it advantages and disadvantages, and for the automation project in particular, a unique set of risks. There are at least four reasons this is important.
Silence can be binding
An invoice arrives in the mail. It’s from your equipment supplier. But you are involved in a bit of a disagreement with the supplier and you ignore it. A month goes by and yet another statement is in the mailbox. Once again you decide to ignore it. Certainly by now the supplier has gotten the message! Six months later, a process server is standing in your office lobby, asking you to sign ...
Seeking dollars for delays
When a delay occurs on an automation project, and your company is considering whether to seek additional compensation, there are really only four questions. The first question is “who caused it?” If it's your company that is to blame, lay low and don't mention it again. (Oh, and, by the way, you can forget about the three other questions.
Beware the dirty dozen
Legalities: Want a good starting place for figuring out whether to accept another company's terms and conditions? Try looking for these "dirty dozen" contract flaws. If you are an integrator or outside engineer and find any of these in a proposed agreement, your internal warning bell ought to be sounding. (If you are an end user, on the other hand, you might consider engaging in a round of high fives.) Link to 8 more.
Make this or make it do this?
Sometimes looking at the legalities side of your business is just a matter of figuring out all the various things that can go wrong. But anyone in the automation or control business who decides to spend an afternoon actually making a list of potential meltdowns usually ends up calling us lawyers—say, by about three o'clock.
Neglect patents at your peril
One of the simplest ways for a company to suffer huge losses in a single year, or even worse—self-destruct—is to infringe on someone else's patent. Lawsuits for patent infringement are guaranteed to cost a company hundreds of thousands of dollars (even much more to defend) and may cost additional millions if infringement is found to have occurred.