In our series of posts about representations and warranties we have recently explored the nature and purpose of the “reps and warranties” clause—to use familiar legal shorthand. We now will examine some common representations and warranties in fashion agreements. For convenience, in these posts, we will use warranties to reference both representations and warranties—terms that, as a practical matter, are functionally equivalent in any event.
First, keep in mind that, when lawyers and fashion business people read the same contract, they rarely read the same clauses with particularity. In a fashion license, for example, it is quite typical for the business people to read the grant of rights, promotional obligations and financial clauses—and that may well be about all. The lawyers, meanwhile, are absorbed to the point of obsession over the warranties and the related indemnities clauses—because those terms can determine who wins and who loses, and for how much, in any litigation concerning the contract. So please forgive your lawyer for going OCD over the warranties; he or she is just doing the job the way that nature intended.
The typical first warranty is an affirmation of a party’s existence. That may seem rather unnecessary: if someone is signing the contract, would that not mean that the signatory exists, for that reason alone? The answer is no. Except in those rare cases of a person signing on behalf of his or her sole proprietorship or a partnership in which he or she is a general partner, the person signing is doing so on behalf of an entity that has a separate, albeit fictive existence. Corporations and limited liability companies, that is, are in effect virtual people. They have many of the rights (such as making money) and duties (such as paying taxes) as real people, and they do it without corporeal existence. These “persons” under business law are liable for what the real people who act on their behalf do for them, but those real people, whether employees, equity holders or other participants are, except in specific cases, not personally liable for the acts and omissions of the entity they serve or represent.
In the United States, the entity can only be such a legal “person” by being formed under the laws of a particular state, and it can only trade consistently within another state by being granted the right to do so. And you guessed it: each state involved extracts various fees and taxes for being the virtual location, in whole or part, of the premises and activities of the fictional person. For that reason, the entity will often be called upon to give a warranty that it has done all that is necessary to maintain its existence. The reason is that, if it has not done so, there may literally be no party able to perform under the terms and conditions of the contract that apply to that entity. A typical, if somewhat long form of a warranty of existence looks like this:
Fashion Company represents and warrants that it is a corporation duly organized and existing under the laws of the State of New York, is authorized to do business in the State of California, and has paid all fees, taxes and governmental charges in connection with the foregoing.
In short: the party making the warranty is affirming that it exists and can do business as promised—and that it is current on its obligations to those governmental authorities that grant those allowances. It is a simple promise to make, but it is just about the most important promise that one business entity can give another because, if it is wrong about any of that, it may not even be an entity capable of making any promises at all—in a contract or otherwise.
In contractual due diligence, it never hurts to investigate independently by checking with the databases of the governmental authorities in question that those promises are accurate. That is because, as cynics and pragmatists everywhere remind us, for some out there, “Promises are meant to be broken.”
Credit: Alan Behr
