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10 Summer 2022 MEMBER SERVICES H AE EHA has extended its protection services for members with a new dedicated contract law legal helpline. This gateway to legal advice initially provides members with a free 30-minute consultation on anything concerning hire and contract law. Not to be confused with HAE EHA’s BusinessGuard’s Human Resources (HR) helpline, which is a separate service for HR and certain other affiliated issues, the contract law legal helpline was launched earlier this year and covers a multitude of legal issues that members are involved in but perhaps struggle to understand the legal obligations of, for example the interpretation of terms and conditions (T&Cs). Set up in collaboration with Boardroom Matters Ltd, the new helpline can offer guidance on a plethora of issues such as standard T&Cs for the hire and sales of goods. Hopefully, most members will know that the law relating to consumers and businesses can be interpreted differently primarily owing to cooling off periods that are afforded to the former but not to the latter. THE TRICKY BUSINESS OF T&CS It’s a far more complicated picture than that. In the event of a dispute, members need to demonstrate that the customer knew of their T&Cs and had actually seen or had their attention drawn to them before any contract was entered into. This can cause immense difficulties when distant selling like agreeing a vehicle hire over the telephone, working through an exchange of emails or even using traditional post. If a HAE EHA member cannot prove that their T&Cs have actually been shown to the consumer or customer it may well be that they cannot be enforced and this means that a hirer could impose their own purchasing T&Cs which are always going to be less favourable than those developed for members by HAE EHA. The HAE EHA contract legal helpline aims to help members sidestep legal minefields and provide succinct but precise guidance in terms of how things should be interpreted. It should be noted that ultimately the aim of the contract legal helpline is to help members avoid taking issues to court if possible, saving them from potentially being out of pocket while keeping on the right side of the law. Court representation is incredibly expensive and time consuming. If the legal dispute amounts to a few thousand pounds, recovery of that money could be more expensive for the member than the actual debt. Whilst members may be able to recover back some of the costs if they win, there is always the risk of losing and also picking up the legal tab of the other side. COST OF GOING TO COURT This is compounded by the rules governing the Small Claims Court which generally (unless the judge is feeling benevolent) does not allow the recovery of legal costs relating to preparing for the hearing, let alone actual court representation. Whilst the small claims route is a streamlined way of handling cases below £10,000 in value, because of its special status, the successful litigant will get a fixed legal recovery contribution of typically £80 in a small claims case, which is not enough to cover even the most frugal of lawyers’ fees. LEGAL HELPLINE FOR MEMBERS New service launched by HAE EHA to help members in a legal pickle.