Professional appointments

Local authority lawyers can have a bewildering variety of forms of professional appointments pass over their desks. They can be asked to form rapid opinions about the relative merits of those documents. How can they judge the comparative strength of appointments when they can differ so much in terms of structure, origin, length and drafting?

The key is to have a mental checklist that covers which clauses are 'must haves' (and how those should be drafted to afford the authority maximum protection), and also which limitations of liability and exclusions of loss a consultant may try to introduce into an appointment.

Wragge & Co's Construction team has prepared a checklist to make appointments more digestible. It also provides the latest market thinking on which caps and exclusions on liability are less objectionable than others and how they should best be drafted to provide maximum protection to an authority.