Maybe, you say that it is a piece of cake. Take your pen, and sign it. No. It is not the case. The first thing is to negotiate the trade terms, including delivery date, product specifications, delivery terms, payment terms, etc. These terms should be negotiated by you and the party or parties involved in the business.

If you have a lawyer who is an expert on international trade laws, it would be wonderful. If you have a group of lawyers to help you, it would be much more wonderful. However, you should make all the conditions clear to the lawyer or lawyers.

If you receive the draft contract from the other party, you need to consult a lawyer for it, if you are not an expert on contracts. There are much more details for you to pay attention to, which may be fatal to your business. Going through the draft carefully and making some changes if necessary are both important procedures before you confirm all the terms. Pay special attention to delivery terms, and payment terms, and try to find if there are many clauses which are unfair to you.

Each confirmation of a contract should be given to a lawyer to help you to make a decision. If there is no problem, sign it. Otherwise, try to make some necessary changes by giving your opinion to the other party. That will be a further negotiation.

Each confirmation of the signed contracts should be written, not oral. At least, there should be an email from the other party. Also, you need to have the lawyer to help to decide if it can be signed. Only with his or her check and approval, you can sign it.

After all this kind of things done, you need to make sure that the contract should be kept in a safe place, for it is very important for your business. So, you need to form a habit that the contract should be kept in order, and it is convenient for you to find it later. No matter how hard it is, no matter how easy it is, you need to follow the procedures that I mentioned above. Otherwise, you may have your regrets later.

A company who is sued and loses is not looked on very kindly by other businesses, especially if they are sued for breach of contract. This kind of suit can ruin a business.

If your company is big and has a large amount of capital, it really should not affect you. They can afford to have an attorney on retainer and get advice when they foresee a problem. If you have a small company, running low on capital it will not have a lot of effect on you either. In fact, if your company is so broke it cannot afford an attorney it will go quickly. The business cannot go to court without an attorney. The business suing will automatically win because the business being sued will forfeit and has no representation.

Somewhere in the late sixties and early seventies, the phrase moved from being "a man's word is his bond" to "if it isn't in writing, it wasn't said, and it didn't happen." This does not mean that there are no longer any trustworthy people in the world. In fact, there are many people who could still use the old maxim.

The reality is that there are probably about as many people who believe that if it was agreed to verbally, it should be the way it is. These good people have had to go into defensive mode to protect themselves. Society becomes more litigious every day. Greedy people believing that the shortest route to financial security is through a lawsuit have spoiled the easygoing ways of years ago.

The problem runs something like this. If nine out of ten people can be trusted, you may go for years without an incident without writing down and notarizing every agreement that you make. The odds being pretty long on getting burned by the bad guy. This is why many stores still accept paper checks. The store knows that nearly everyone that comes through the line is going to write a good check.

However, for the small business owner, the one out of 40 or 50 people who write bad checks can make a big enough dent in the profits to sink the business if it runs on a shoestring. To protect themselves from the rare bad check, the business is forced to convert to debit cards and those machines that void the check and process it like a debit. Those who would still like to just write the check and move on are all punished because of the lack of integrity found in a few.

Multiply these small numbers by the hundreds of millions of transactions, and it becomes obvious that this is a big problem in a nation of 300 million people where most of the people have hundreds of transactions during the course of a single year.

The same scenario plays out for nearly every facet of life. It might be an agreement about whether to cut down a tree on the property line between two neighbors. It could be a deal to sell an item at a certain price and learning that it might be worth more to someone else.

If it has not been written down, most people today do not see it as a commitment if it is to their advantage. A man's word is no longer his bond because we have opted for the security of the written word over the spoken word. If the tape is not running to record what we say, it is the norm today to assume that it was never said.

Yes, that's right. One project with one client, and I've been contracted through multiple agencies.

I started off with Advecta. Then after a few years some things changed with the end client as a services contract was signed with IBM. Now all contractors and services needed to be routed through IBM. Well, Advecta is not on IBM's preferred vendor list, so IBM brought Synova, which is a preferred vendor, into the picture. Now instead of being contracted directly to the end client from Advecta I get routed from Advecta to Synova to IBM to the end client. Where there was once just one agency, there were suddenly three. During this time Advecta rolls back up into ProStaff. As soon as that happens I become eligible to receive six holidays a year and two service bonuses a year. So after 1400 hours and again at 2000 hours on the project I can request a service bonus equivalent to a week's pay. That was the closest I've come to feeling like I was being treated like a real person in the contracting agency's eyes.

Of course, sooner or later three hands in the cookie jar will empty the jar much faster than just one hand. It seems that ProStaff wasn't making much money off of my contract due to excessive fees from Synova. Of course, Synova claims that they weren't making any money from my contract either and that their cut didn't even cover the cost of processing my paperwork. Suddenly I'm just some number again to both companies and the decision was made that my contract needed to change so that someone would make more money off of me. Fine. Whatever. As long as I can work it really doesn't matter who signs my paycheck, right? Not quite.

ProStaff made the decision and signed the paperwork to transfer me to Synova two weeks before the cut over date. ProStaff did not notify me of this until four days before they were to end my contract. In the mean time, Synova never bothered to send me any paperwork, I had to request it from them. In getting their paperwork I found out that I would lose my holidays and bonuses and end up with a contract that I did not agree with. Synova attempted to recalculate out a new rate which would include the lost wages, however their calculations were flawed. They still assumed that I would work a full forty hours over holiday weeks (so try working forty hours in three days over Thanksgiving week). Then to sweeten the deal they rounded up to the next dollar. Thanks guys, you screw me on the few benefits I have and then you basically give me a raise of twenty three cents an hour. Twenty three cents! And they wondered why I was less than grateful to them.

Enter VICCS into the picture. I wasn't going to put up with Synova and their poor math skills and iron clad contract which would prevent me for doing any computer work for a year after I leave. I received a truncated list of other IBM approved vendors and researched what benefits they would might have. VICCS had the best I could find so I contacted them basically offering them a free contract where they could make some money while I could still be paid.

Unfortunately ProStaff didn't give me enough time to do any negotiating, so while I was working with VICCS and waiting for their final offer (and trying to negotiate with Synova just to see where I could take it) I effectively went on strike. I had no contract, so couldn't work. And other than the one day I did work since one of the end client managers told me that since they still considered me employed I could still work and that they would figure out how to pay me retroactively I didn't work. IBM caught me at the end of the day in the office and informed me that I had to vacate the premises since I did not have a contract. They didn't seem very pleased that I was hoodwinked into working that day without a contract and that consequently I couldn't be paid for the work I just did. The end client didn't like that I told them I was on strike and refused to help them.

In the end though it worked out, VICCS came through for me and I ended up with another dollar and change above Synova's offer as well as four holidays a year. The contract is better too. I can work on a computer after I leave this post. The only thing I won't be able to do is try and get hired at a company that they presented me as a candidate to for one year. Of course, since I went to them on my own, that leaves my options wide open. I think I can live with that. As for the benefits, it's still not what I had, but it's a start. I don't know who's happier though about the contract being signed. The end client is thrilled that I can work again after a week of down time. I'm just happy that I'll be starting to collect a paycheck again after a week of no pay.

Or will I get paid? I turned in my time sheet on time, my line manager at the end client approved my time, but after a week IBM still had not approved my time sheet and I was contacted by VICCS asking if I had started work or not as they had not yet received an approved time sheet from me. At this point I don't know if it was just an honest oversight, or some spiteful action on IBM's behalf to make me sweat after what they see was a frivolous waste of time. IBM has one more business day to approve my time, otherwise I'll end up going another two weeks before getting paid again.

All in all though this entire experience has shown me that as a contractor, and hourly employee, it doesn't matter what I do or how skilled I am. In the long run I will have no future. Going full time somewhere isn't going to make me any more secure about if my job will be around from month to month, but it will mean that I will no longer be reliant on others for contracts and paychecks. I'm tired of being a number. I just want to focus on doing my job. I shouldn't have to waste two weeks negotiating my contract every year.