Many people will have come across the phrases \u201cbest endeavours\u201d and \u201creasonable endeavours\u201d in their business lives and will have their own views as to what each means. If you have never heard of the phrases before, \u201creasonable endeavours\u201d essentially means taking one, but not necessarily all, reasonable courses of action. \u201cBest endeavours\u201d is a higher obligation, which means doing all you reasonably can, even potentially acting against your own commercial interests. But take great care before inserting or accepting terms such as these into contracts you may sign or letters you may send. It can have unintended consequences.<\/p>\n
Often a contract can require you to do (or not to do) something. But if the contract actually requires you to achieve an outcome, then this unqualified obligation could meet an open-ended nightmare if you have agreed to use your \u201cbest endeavours\u201d to meet it.<\/p>\n
The Court of Appeal forced an airport operator to accept arrival and departure flights outside the airport’s usual opening hours because they had agreed to use “best endeavours” to promote an airline’s low-cost service,<\/span>\u00a0even though none of this was mentioned in the contract and the operator would incur losses by doing so. A heavy burden indeed.<\/p>\n \u00a0And we haven\u2019t even mentioned \u201creasonable endeavours\u201d or, worse still, \u201call reasonable but commercially prudent endeavours\u201d \u2013 messy hybrids than even the Courts are struggling to interpret. Be careful that you understand what you are agreeing to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When it comes to commercial contracts, you might want to think twice before promising your “best endeavours”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":7975,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_joinchat":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[12345],"tags":[10998,11000,9311,8706,10999,11001],"class_list":{"0":"post-4754","1":"articles","2":"type-articles","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-contracts-and-agreements","8":"tag-best-endeavours","9":"tag-commercial-interests","10":"tag-contract","11":"tag-court-of-appeal","12":"tag-reasonable-endeavours","13":"tag-unqualified-obligation"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n