Legal Issues, Contracts, and Agreements

I had the pleasure yesterday of spending the day with 35 members of the Purchasing Management Association of Western New England in Holyoke, MA. I conducted a seminar about contracts, agreements, and legal issues. This was a diverse group and represented manufacturing, service, municipal, and educational organizations.

This was an engaged, interested, and participative class. We started working on legal issues and jargon and spent a lot of time on the Uniform Commercial Code, agency and authority, offer and acceptance, service contract formation, and we tied it together with a session on negotiation. And we kept it related to working with suppliers in a relationship based environment.

One of the interesting discussions took place around agency. We are agents of the company and have been given fiduciary responsibility to spend the organization’s money. But what about requisitioners? We often drive purchases down to the lowest level and grant authority to our requisitioners to buy (credit card) or release (blanket orders) from existing agreements. But we are also bestowing on them formal agency. Can that get organizations in trouble? It depends

And it turns out ‘it depends’ was the most popular term at yesterday’s seminar. The law is tough to navigate. Thanks for a nice day.