The Business Divorce Law Report
A contract means what it says, even if the two parties who came to the agreement may have understood something different. This can be a trap for the business that is not careful to ensure that the contract that it signs at the end of negotiations accurately reflects exactly what it thinks it has agreed to.
It is not particularly unusual that, at the end of a period of negotiations, the contract that is finally written up does not exactly fit the terms the parties thought they had negotiated or that it does not contain all of the terms that the parties thought were relevant. A court, however, is unlikely to read those terms into the agreement, or even permit one of the parties to argue that they should have been there – at least not when the meaning of the agreement is plain from its terms.
Court Review
The New Jersey Appellate Division opinion in MicroBilt Corp. v. L2C, LLC demonstrates just how difficult it can be to get a court to consider that there were important terms missing from the final document that should have been included.
MicroBilt signed a contract with L2C under which L2C would perform credit evaluations of MicroBilt’s potential customers and provide customer credit scores to MicroBilt. MicroBilt later claimed that L2C was also required to supply the underlying data used to calculate the credit score, which L2C obtained from a third party vendor. L2C claimed it could not provide the underlying data because its contract with its vendor prohibited the release.