Jay Parkhill June 10th, 2008

My clients are doing more and more transactions with European customers these days. A few years ago I worked on a lot of agreements to have products developed for my clients in China and elsewhere. I still do those, but now European companies are finding great deals in the U.S. so I’ve been working through a lot of those as well. It’s fascinating to see the economic pendulum swing across the globe like that.

In any case, one European customer sent over a form document containing a set of standard purchase terms. I’m not fully up on the details, but it looks as though they are required to file these with an EU government office.

I find it extremely heartening to see that the standard terms include this language on sustainable practices.

This makes me wonder about two things:

1) If this is merely required language and is just window-dressing or if the company actually stands behind it; and

2) What it would take to get companies in the U.S. to think about and add terms like this to their contracts.

Tags: business practices, sustainability

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