Contract Management

Journal of Strategic Contracting and Negotiation, Ahead of Print. <br/>The article discusses how proactive contract theory could be used to translate the ambitious objectives of the European Commission's current draft proposal on corporate sustainability due diligence into actual business practices in complex value chains and networks. Proactive contract theory regards contracts as legal, economic, managerial and social artefacts that should be designed to prevent undesirable results and promote favourable outcomes. Moreover, the theory highlights the need for multiprofessional collaboration and user-centricity in contract design. Based on these principles, we introduce four ways to promote corporate sustainability due diligence in supply contracts via proactive contracting: turning from one-sided safeguarding towards shared responsibility and collaboration, incentivizing responsible and sustainable business practices via promotive contract clauses, engaging end users in the contract design process and preventing disputes.

Journal of Strategic Contracting and Negotiation, Ahead of Print. <br/>This paper presents a bargaining model of contract outcomes as a function of contract uncertainties associated with critical supply purchasing after a crisis. It examines contract modifications and termination. The model yields the following results: (1) contract modification by the government alone (unilateral modification) does not change the optimal contract; (2) contract modification by mutual agreement (bilateral modification) makes the optimal contract dependent on product price, acquisition costs, transaction costs, and uncertainty; (3) mutual contract modifications are affected negatively by government costs of contract modification and are affected positively by supplier's costs of contract modification; (4) the government may find it necessary to terminate a contract if the contract elasticity of government utility is zero, and the contractor may want to terminate the contract when its supply price equals the acquisition price.

Journal of Strategic Contracting and Negotiation, Volume 6, Issue 2, Page 137-158, June 2022. <br/>There is surely room for improvement in commercial contracting practice. The current contracting evolution often leads to a situation where contracts become increasingly and may be needlessly, complex. The paper discusses how complex contracts evolve and how the proposed legal design approach can bring comprehensibility for tackling complexity in contracting. This approach is providing for various benefits and incentives, such as business sustainability, reduced transaction costs, and competitive business advantage. A novel legal quality metric is introduced. This metric will foster the measuring of quality in the legal profession. The metric, comprehensibility, would better serve both lawyers and clients in measuring the true quality of legal services, processes, and products – than the often used, easily misleading metrics such as time spent, cases won, and hours billed. Through this innovative approach to legal quality metrics, the paper will bring further understanding of the impact of comprehensibility in commercial contracting.

Journal of Strategic Contracting and Negotiation, Volume 6, Issue 2, Page 159-161, June 2022. <br/>

Journal of Strategic Contracting and Negotiation, Volume 6, Issue 2, Page 107-136, June 2022. <br/>Literature suggests that interdependencies may expose construction contractors to payment risks. However, prior research has tended to assume a disconnected perspective, which ignores the interdependence effect. To bridge this gap, a network of incompatible practices was built using judgments from subject matter experts in payment dispute cases in Kenya. After that, social network analysis (SNA) techniques such as Eigenvector and Lambda partitioning were used to analyze it. Ten interdependencies that expose contractors to payment risk were identified. The interdependence between the payment upon verified performance and the failure to match the work done with the amounts paid initiates and transmits most of these risks. In line with the power-law principle, fewer than 20% initiate and transmit more than 80% of the risks. This study demonstrates how economizing strategies can influence the choice of practices, complement blockchain decentralization measures, and improve the analysis of payment dispute cases.