Overview

It's late at night and you're negotiating the final details of a complex commercial deal. Can you just sign the contract and leave those last few details to be worked out later?

It's quite common for parties to sign contracts leaving some of the detail to be inserted later - and there may be situations where it's unavoidable. The most obvious risk you are running is that, for one reason or another, the detail never gets filled in - and you then get into a dispute with the other party on the very issue that the detail would have helped to resolve.

Sometimes, the courts will be prepared to fill in detail that is missing from an agreement. However, they do not generally see it as their job to write the contract for the parties and will only intervene in a limited way (if at all).

Travers Smith discusses the pitfalls of leaving out details in a contract.

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