Drafting the international sales contract.

• Author: Cavendish, Michael
• Position: Review

Drafting the International Sales Contract

by Karla C. Shippey

Practicing international law can be exhilarating if you are comfortably confident you are not missing something important. For the occasional practitioner particularly, steering an international business transaction away from failure can seem daunting when a client new to the international scene seeks advice. Most business attorneys, if presented with a client wanting to buy from or sell to an international partner, would prefer a concise reference outlining the framework of an international sales contract to hours of costly and frustrating research. Fortunately, Karla C. Shippey has written a text for non-specialists and international lawyers alike that renders completing an international sale approachable.

A Short Course in International Contracts: Drafting the International Sales Contract is a text to be kept close to an attorney's desk pad. The book's highly useful format is designed to gently draw the reader through three levels of international understanding. The first chapters present an overview of the role of the contract in international commerce. The focus then turns to new issues unique to international contracts that the experienced business attorney should be familiar with. Additional chapters provide explanations of trade terms that may be foreign to a new international practitioner and discuss the roles of the parties to an international transaction and their lawyers.

Once the reader is aware of what a contract should do in an international transaction and can recognize the relevant legal terms of art, the middle chapters isolate recurring problems faced by international counsel, including interpretation and validity problems, compliance with import and export controls, and title and payment issues. The author treats the difficulties she exposes with specific examples of contract language designed to prevent misunderstandings between buyers' and sellers' attorneys and avoid the disappointment that follows. The analysis accompanying the examples is practical and insightful. The sample and explanation format used throughout encourage the reader to...