The Contract Law Lifecycle: The Impact Of Case Law On Everything From Contract Formation To Interpretation

At our most recent ThinkHouse Foundations event, Associate, Alex Wrixon, from our Commercial Litigation team gave an update on the latest developments in contracts law, looking at how key cases have a bearing on the 'contract lifecycle'. This helpful overview touches on the hot topics of balancing 'textualism' and 'contextualism', contract variation, and the implication of terms.

Transcript

Tom Cox: Hello. My name is Tom Cox. I am a Senior Associate at Gowling WLG and I co-chair ThinkHouse Foundations, a network for in-house lawyers at the start of their careers where we provide tailored training, development and resources exclusively for paralegals, trainees and lawyers of up to five years PQE. I am joined this afternoon by Alex Wrixon, an Associate in the Commercial Litigation team. Alex has just delivered a contract law update to our audience and has now kindly agreed to sit down with me to cover some of the key points discussed. Good afternoon Alex.

Alex Wrixon: Afternoon Tom.

Tom: So one of the key things that seemed to come out of your talk today is the approach currently been adopted by the Courts in relation to contract law. Would you care to share that with our audience?

Alex: So, when I was going through trying to organise the cases that we were going to look at, I ended up putting them into an order - rather than chronological - of looking at the life of a contract. So, from formation through to determining which terms we were interpreting. But actually, looking at the exercise in the round, there was certainly a picture [that] appeared to emerge. One of the earliest cases I was looking at was Wood and Capita, which I think people will be familiar with. This was with the Supreme Court last year, where the Supreme Court took this opportunity to essentially make its mark on... what the Supreme Court says, is there was not a dichotomy between so called textualism and contextualism, strict words on the page and the wider context. However, notwithstanding what the Supreme Court said, I think a lot of people had felt that there was divergent law and the Supreme Court, whilst on the one hand saying this is a balance and it is a process that requires both, it was the flavour of the judgment really that was a victory for so called textualism. Really looking at the words on the page and strict application of what parties had in fact contracted to. That theme actually seems to be happening across the other cases that I looked at as well.

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