You seem to understand exactly. If it helps, don’t imagine a seller at all. The Agency rents things to customers. Let’s say they are paddle boats on a lake. The Principal has the separate contracts with three separate Agents. One is for giving paddle boats to customers and receiving the paddle boats back from the customers. Another contract is for maintenance of the paddle boats. That agent is paid a month fee to fix the paddle boats, regardless of how many break. If five are broken, or if 50 are broken, it doesn’t matter. That agent has to fix whatever is broken. It’s all on a fixed price.
The third contract is with “Person A”. This agent has to inspect the paddle boats “within 48 hours of receipt” by the Principal (or rather, by the principal’s other agent). The point of this is to ensure that broken paddle boats are promptly sent to the maintenance person to fix.
Let’s say that there is going to be a very busy weekend and the Principal will end up renting ALL of the paddle boats. Person A never planned for this. There are 400 paddle boats and he/she can only inspect 100 per day. So, Person A wants to inspect half of them before they are turned back in. If the paddle boats are rented out for the whole weekend, Person A can just walk around the shore and inspect the boats for damage. Person A wants to start doing this 48 hours before receipt and then finish the remaining 200 boats 48 hours after they are turned in. This 4-day window would fall “within 48 hours of receipt”.
Does the Agent have any ground in such an argument? Is the Agent 100% wrong, or just mostly wrong?
I like Saint_Cad’s example as well. Imagine the Agent is drug tester and needs to test all the players “within 48 hours” of a match.
It doesn’t have to relate to purchasing in anyway whatsoever. The only thing that matters for a scenario is that a person is contracted to do something “within 48 hours” of something else. Can that language be interpreted to give the Person 96 hours to accomplish the task.
Why is this still so abstract? Are you concerned with a real life contract, or what is motivating this? I don’t think a question about the interpretation of language in a contract can be answered sensibly without the full context. Virtually all language can be nitpicked to some degree of ambiguity without context.
I guess I’m just trying to determine if there is any scenario where “within 48 hours” can refer to a 96 hour window, or does it always mean either “before” or “after” based on context.
I think we got that. But why are you being so coy about the specifics of why you want to know this? You’re just not going to get a definitive read on the interpretation of language (legal or otherwise) without full context.
Are you in a multi-million dollar dispute with a Chinese company about an import order? Looking to settle an argument with your wife about when you should have picked up the milk?
There is a real contract with similar language that piqued my curiosity. It’s most similar to the paddle boat scenario. The Agent is required to check the paddle boats for leaks so that they can be resealed by a different maintenance agent. The only way to actually do this “after” receipt is to transport the boats back onto the lake, or use a large tub in the boathouse to check each one individually. It would be a lot easier for the agent (Person A) to test the boats when they are still in the water, just before the customer removes it from the lake and returns it to the Principal’s receiving agent who takes the boats back to the boathouse where they are received by the Principal. This proposal makes a lot of sense, because it’s easiest to leak test the boats while they are in the water, and there is no chance that moving the boats 100m back to the boathouse will cause a leak. So, why not just let Person A check the boats before they are technically “received”? In this case, it makes sense for everyone to let Person A do it this way. But, this is occurring prior to receipt, not after. Even though it is right before “receipt” it is practically simultaneous with receipt (at least within a few hours), so it should probably be allowed. After all, the contract doesn’t say “after receipt”. It says “within 48 hours of receipt”. So doing it before receipt should be allowed anyway. Or maybe not? This was the part that triggered my curiosity. The fact that the contract doesn’t actually say “after”.
From there, the whole thing just got me thinking. If they start 8 hours before receipt, do they still have 48 hours available after receipt to finish the ones they couldn’t get to? Or do they only have 40 hours left? Is it still a 48 hour window starting from when the first boat of the batch is tested? Or is it a 96 hour window starting 48 hours before the boat is received and ending 48 hours after ? If it’s 48 hour, does it start whenever the agent starts leak testing?
Yes, it’s all just pedantic. I was just really curious to find an example of when “within 48 hours” could mean a 96 hour window. In the real-life scenario, it seems that the boats can be tested prior to receipt as long as they are about to be turned in to the receiving agent, but they still get 48 hours to test all the boats. So really, they are being given like 60 hours to test all the boats from start to finish. That doesn’t seem like it should be technically correct. If they are allowed a 60 hour window, then where does it stop? Should they get a 96 hour window? Surely, not. Right? Are there times when such language would allow for it, though?
It’s not a super important question. I’m just thinking out loud, I guess.
100% wrong, absurd and should be fired for incompetence.
The intent here is obviously that Person A inspects the boats after they are returned. It makes absolutely no sense for an inspection to occur before the boat has been returned. When you are renting a car, the people inspect the car when it’s returned, not the day before. What happens if the driver damages the car after the inspection?
Anytime you contract with people to perform a task, you discuss their ability of handle quantities. If there are 400 boats and Person A never dreamed that they could all be rented, Person A shouldn’t be in that business.
This should be part of the negotiations and it should be clearly understood when the inspection should occur. If the understanding is that the inspection should occur after the boat has been returned (and it makes absolutely no sense for an inspection to occur before it’s been returned) then a pedantic argument is a good way to lose a contract.
OK, I got one.
Company policy states that I must have a negative covid test within 48 hours of a job offer. They assume that means after the job offer because who is psychic and knows if and when they will get an offer. For completely unrelated reasons I got a negative test the day before the offer.
So true. The problem(s) here is that the number of boats has increased since the contract was written, and there is nothing written in the contract that stipulates the number of boats.
Everyone knows that the boats are much, much easier to leak-test en masse while they are still in the water. The receiving agent and the leak-testing agent had subcontracted with the same company. So, in the past, the “leak testing” was getting done by the receiving agents before they loaded the boats on the trailer. They all worked for the same company, so as long as the boats were leak tested upon return, everything was fine and nobody complained.
But now the leak-tester agent has subcontracted with a different company. So, the receiving agents—no longer working under the same management as the leak testing agents—will no longer conduct the leak testing, no matter how easy it is to do on the water. They have told the leak tester to do it. They’ve also told the leak tester that he cannot do it in the water because it will slow down their loading of the boats onto the trailer. They’ve pointed out that the leak-test requirement is actually for “after receipt” anyway. So, he must do it in the boat house or bring each boat back to the lake himself to test.
The leak tester assures everyone that testing on the lake will not interfere with the receiving agents loading the boats onto the trailers and that the contract doesn’t say “after receipt” anyway. It says “within 48 hours of receipt”. 8 hours prior is “within 48 hours”. Therefore, he should be allowed to do it on the lake as much as possible. So, the argument goes, anyway. In order to not interfere with the receiving agents, he has to allow them to load any boat they are ready to load. He tries to stay ahead of them, but the loading goes faster than the testing and there are always a few that get loaded without being tested. What, then, is the time limit to bring these boats back to the water to test? Sure, it is 48 hours, right? So, does the tester actually have a window greater than 48 hours to test all the boats? That can’t be right, can it? If that’s the case, what is the limit? 96 hours?
Oh, please. Get over yourself. I didn’t ask for people “with real business experience” to chime in with their vast knowledge, did I? If you don’t want to participate, then don’t. You weren’t helping anyway. I’m not sure why you thought this thread was speaking directly to you or calling for you to answer it. You’re not a lawyer or a pedant and you have no interest in actually answering the question. Instead, you continue to fight the hypothetical and completely avoid the actual question. I’m glad you’re “out of here”. It was rather annoying reading all that unrelated lecture about international sales. Now maybe we can focus on the question.
The actual contract is not a hypothetical, by the way. And not every contract is about “sales”. Enjoy yourself while you’re gone.
Everything about the paddle boat scenario is true, by the way. I’ve just changed the actual equipment to paddle boats. If only there was an international man of business such as yourself to write this contract, everything could have been prevented years ago. Instead, here we are.