Enforceable Contracts

Introduction

Gone were the days when the contracts were finalized sitting face-to-face contact across the table or waiting for fax confirmations to confirm a final agreement between two contracting parties. With the emergence and development of high end technologies, people and businesses have increased their reliance on, and their use of these mediums as an avenue for business commerce, as it can be more convenient. This has tremendously impacted the businesses operating the usual brick and mortar environment to an electronic platform (Adamu, 2012), where contracts are consummated at a distance without physical contact between the contracting parties.

Today’s ecommerce business is being conducted in chat rooms, web sites, and through electronic mail (Koepsell, 2000). As this cyberspace is getting more globalized, it makes easy for organizations to exchange their products, service offerings and increased market value all over the world, in turn affecting the world economy.

Though the Internet has brought new options to reinforce electronic contracts, however it has essentially complicated jurisdictional issues in the contracts leading to fraud, crime, falsifying on the promises, and the agreement breaches. The essence of a contract is that, it is a legally enforceable promise or set of promises (Mallor et al., 2010, pg.290). The law of contracts recommends to have a valid contract that meets all of the legal requirements for a binding contract (Mallor et al., 2010, pg. 291) and enforceable in the court. The question is, what if a valid contract does not exists between two parties and still there had been commercial trade happening between two with mutual trust and client offerings for several years.

In my final paper, I am presenting the case analysis about the recent lawsuit win by my company Hewlett-Packard (HP) against Oracle Corporation. In addition, I will be discussing how important is for the contractual parties to remain lawfully committed to their...