<p>Filter Knowledge</p>

Document execution sounds like a dry topic, but last-minute problems with execution can derail the most carefully-negotiated and documented transactions. In this increasingly digital age, the validity of electronic signatures is top of our list of FAQs, but more traditional questions as to the manner of execution never seem to go away.

One of your employees has left to work for a competitor. You suspect that they have taken a copy of your customer database with them.

With both the public and private sectors looking to cut costs and "do more with less", outsourcing is often seen as a solution. This briefing highlights how customers of outsourcing providers can avoid some of the major pitfalls.

It's easily done: following months of negotiations, a draft contract is ready for signature but other things take priority, work begins and the contract never gets signed. Six months later, a dispute arises – but, as the draft hasn't been signed, it isn't binding.

Possibly to the embarrassment of the Home Office, the Abu Qatada deportation case provides a useful reminder of the ambiguities inherent in many commonly-used expressions of time in legal documents.

On 1 June 2007, after years of hard fought political lobbying, the EU's Regulation on the Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) finally came into force. Viewed by many as the most complex piece of EU legislation to date, REACH changes how chemicals will be made, imported and used within the EU.