I thought this article interesting after my earlier discussion on negotiating contracts:

Web design contracts: Why Bother?

What I particularly liked was the proposition that besides being a legal document (which almost certainly you will never exercise legally), a contract fulfills a socio-psychological function, by forcing all parties to think about the agreement they are about to enter. Specifically, "the solemnity involved in the act of signing a contract—the ritual of the contract negotiation and execution itself—impresses on the parties that they are making a commitment to each other, and that the document they are signing describes that commitment."

Admitedly this process is somewhat less solemn when it being conducted in different countries, and document you are signing is a scanned and emailed and then printed version of the contract… but the essence is still there.

Once the price and scope of works was finalised between myself and my supplier, it was time to finalise and sign the contract.

This process generally involves lawyers and long documents and much to-ing and fro-ing, but we are a small company, and my supplier is as well. There were no lawyers involved on my side, and the contract that the supplier proposed was only 3 pages long. However, we were able to pool together other contract and non-disclosure agreement templates from other software development projects we had done in the past, and just decided to use common sense in compiling a reasonable contract. We realised early on that with our budget, and the suppliers Eastern European location, the likelihood of us ever mounting a legal challenge on any point, and of a resolution ever being achieved through legal means, was negligible. The costs of such a process were prohibitive, and the discrepancies between the legal systems in both countries was too difficult to contemplate.

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