Sourcing Speak

Most business clients would rather be in the dentist’s chair than sit through negotiation of the indemnity and liability provisions of their agreement. Admit it: your eyes glaze over, time appears to visibly slow down, and you wonder at how the lawyers can find this stuff interesting enough to argue about.

As dull as they appear to be, there are some significant issues that can arise from the indemnity clause. One issue that I see more often than not is that suppliers try to put a financial limit on their indemnification obligations.

Sometimes the supplier will agree to remove the limitation, but not always. What are the consequences of having a limitation on an indemnification obligation,

In a recent judgement, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales held that an electronic database was not a chose in possession or a chattel but a chose in action (see our earlier blog regarding the grant of leave to appeal in this case). In other words, a database is intangible property, not goods which can be possessed. This means that when the parties to a database hosting contract are silent about what happens to the database when the contract ends, the service provider cannot exercise a common law lien over the database so as to force full payment of its fees, and must return the database to its customer.

In giving the lead judgement in the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Moore-Bick, quoted extensively from the judgment of Lord Justice Diplock in Tappenden v Artus (Tappenden v Artus [1964] 2 Q.B. 185). Tappenden is a case with which most first year law students in the UK will be familiar. In that case, a van owner allowed a customer to use the van pending the completion of a hire-purchase agreement. The van then broke down and was repaired by the defendant garage, but the price of the repairs was not paid. The question arose whether the garage could exercise a lien over the van against the owner. In finding that it could, Diplock L.J emphasised “actual possession of goods” as necessary for the self-help remedy of possessory lien to arise under the common law.

Referring to another leading case, Moore-Bick LJ went on to state that “[a]s OBG v Allan makes clear… the common law draws a sharp distinction between tangible and intangible property…”, which leads to the conclusion that “it is [not] possible to have actual possession of an intangible thing …[and that] it is [not] open to this court to recognise the existence of a possessory lien over intangible property …”

Mario Dottori is quoted in Stephanie Overby’s recent CIO.com article discussing 8 Tips to Deal With Liability When Outsourcing to Multiple IT Vendors.

“In theory, a multi-provider service delivery environment should not create additional complexities in terms of liability. The contracts — entered into separately between the customer and each supplier — should, if well constructed, clearly delineate the liabilities between the parties,” says Mario Dottori, leader of the global sourcing practice in Pillsbury’s Washington, D.C. office.

One tip offered is to create operation level agreements, “OLAs state how particular parties involved in the process of delivering IT services will interact with each other in order to maintain performance, and can help all parties ‘see the forest for the trees,’ says Dottori.  ‘These arrangements offer the opportunity for enhanced visibility of the service regime as a whole and helps to reduce — or better arm the parties with solutions for — missed hand-offs and finger pointing.’ One caveat: Most providers will not agree to take on additional liability in OLAs. But such an agreement can be an effective preventative measure.”