Advocatenkantoor Bondam - General Terms & Conditions
1. These general terms & conditions apply to every assignment handled by us, Advocatenkantoor Bondam, on or after 1 January 2007. This includes every follow-up assignment or amended or supplementary assignment issued to Advocatenkantoor Bondam or persons employed by Advocatenkantoor Bondam. Any clauses deviating from these terms & conditions will apply only if and insofar as we have confirmed them to you, the Client, in writing. If any provision in these terms & conditions conflicts fully or partly with any obligatory provision, these terms and conditions will remain in full force for the remaining provisions. We explicitly reject any conditions to the contrary and only commit ourselves in the event that we have explicitly agreed to them in writing.
2. The assignment is carried out with due observance of the prevailing regulations for lawyers. You are expected to respect our resulting obligations. We will ensure that the work is carried out carefully, but cannot guarantee that we will achieve any intended result. We will exercise due care when engaging the services of third parties. We are not liable for failures of such third parties to perform. The aforementioned engagement of third parties is for your own account and risk.
3. You are obliged to inform us in writing immediately of any changes in your address, e-mail address and communication numbers. If you fail to respond to written notifications and requests, we are authorised to suspend our work immediately without further warning and, if necessary, to terminate them following written notification to your last known address.
4. Documents which you have made available to us in connection with the assignment will be returned to you during the assignment or, at the latest, on termination of the assignment, unless agreed otherwise. You will always receive a photocopy of documents made available to us in connection with the assignment by third parties, unless you decide against this in a specific case or if this is not advisable, not permitted or practically infeasible for other reasons. We may make our own copy, referred to as the working copy, of the documents made available to us in connection with the assignment or documents produced by us, if we deem this necessary for any reason whatsoever. The working copy is the property of the office and does not have to be surrendered to you or to third parties. The costs of photocopying are for your account in all cases.
5. You may be eligible for government-funded legal aid (“legal assistance”) under the Legal Aid Act. In that case, instead of a fee, you will be charged a personal contribution to be determined by the government. In addition, you may be charged expenses to be specified. Information on this can be obtained from the Legal Aid Council (“Raad voor Rechtsbijstand”), Laan van Meerdervoort 51, 2517 AE The Hague, The Netherlands, telephone +31 (0)703701414, website: www.rvr.org. We will proceed on the assumption that you do not wish to apply for legal assistance, unless you request us to do so explicitly.
6. If you are not entitled to legal assistance or if this has been withdrawn, you will be charged our fee and the expenses to be specified, and possibly Dutch VAT (value added tax). The rates are agreed in writing. If no rates are agreed in writing, the rates stated on the website and price list will apply. We may adjust the agreed rates on the basis of the inflation rate defined by Statistics Netherlands (CBS). Once you have been informed of such an adjustment, you have fourteen days to object to it, after which it will become irrevocable. In urgent situations, or in the event of necessary or requested work outside of normal office ours, we are entitled to increase the applicable rate by a maximum of fifty percent. If you are involved in a particular matter together with another client, you are joint and severally liable for the whole.
7. The fee is calculated on the basis of the hours spent in accordance with our records. Our records serve as conclusive proof, unless you provide proof to the contrary. We can round the amount of time spent on the assignment to units of 6 minutes; in connection to this, partly used units are counted as full units. If you miss or arrive late for an appointment, we may charge the time reserved for the appointment at our standard hourly rate as damage sustained.
8. You will be given a specification of the charges for expenses incurred by us or to be incurred by us on your behalf. These include, but are not limited to: travel and accommodation expenses, costs of international telephone calls, copying work, postage expenses, costs for inspection of registers or databases, court registry fees, and the costs paid or to be paid to third parties such as bailiff’s costs, advertising costs, procurator’s costs and courier costs. We will not charge a percentage of the fee as an office expenses charge, unless this was explicitly agreed upon in writing.
9. We may demand advance payment before or during the execution of an assignment, in default of which we are entitled to suspend our work. We are not obliged to act for you or to enter into financial obligations for you as long as the requested advanced payment has not been made. Our invoice is to be paid in euros without setoff, by deposit or funds transfer to the bank or Postbank account mentioned on the invoice. The payment term is fourteen days after the invoice date, or earlier or later as indicated on the invoice. If you exceed the payment term, you will be deemed to be in default by operation of law and without any further notice of default. In that case you will owe interest on the amount due, amounting to twelve percent per year, unless we are entitled to a higher interest rate on the basis of Articles 6:119 or 6:119A of the Dutch Civil Code, in which case the higher interest rate will apply. After each year, the amount on which the aforementioned interest is charged will be increased by the interest due for that year. We are entitled to suspend compliance with our obligations, including the surrender of documents to your or to third parties, until you have settled all due and payable debts.
10. If you are of the opinion that you have incurred damage as a result of our acts or omissions, you must inform us of this in writing within three months of the time at which you became aware of this or should reasonably have become aware of this. If you fail to do so, you will forfeit your right to compensation. Our liability for a professional error which causes damage to you is limited to the amount that is paid under our professional liability policy in such circumstances, plus the amount of the policy excess. Our professional liability policy is available for inspection at our office. You indemnify us against any claims by third parties arising from or related to the work we have performed for you.
11. Our firm observes the ‘Klachten- en Geschillenregeling Advocatuur’ (Complaints & Disputes Scheme for the Legal Profession). All disputes arising from the formation and/or realisation of our services, including all invoice disputes that cannot be resolved through our internal complaints procedure, will be settled in accordance with the ‘Reglement Geschillencommissie Advocatuur’ (Regulations of the Disputes Committee for the Legal Profession). You can request this from the ‘Geschillencommissie Advocatuur’ (Disputes Committee for the Legal Profession), P.O. Box 90600, 2509 LP The Hague, The Netherlands, telephone +31 (0)70 3105310, fax +31 (0)70 3658814 , website: www.Geschillencommissie.nl. The Disputes Committee for the Legal Profession is authorised to rule on complaints concerning the quality of our services and the amount of every type of expense claim. In addition, the Disputes Committee is authorised to rule on claims up to a maximum amount of ten thousand euros. Higher claims can only be submitted to the Disputes Committee for the Legal Profession if you limit the amount of the claim to ten thousand euros, and you waive any amount in excess of that. The Disputes Committee for the Legal Profession rules to the exclusion of the ordinary court. It is not possible to appeal against the rulings of the Disputes Committee for the Legal Profession.
12. If you are not satisfied with regard to the quality of our services or the amount of our invoice, you must use our internal complaints procedure first. Our internal complaints procedure is described on our website and can be sent to you on request. You must file your complaint within three months of the time at which you became aware or should reasonably have become aware of the acts or omissions that led to your complaint. We will attempt to find a solution to the problem as soon as possible in consultation with you. This solution will be confirmed to you in writing within four weeks. If we do not succeed in resolving your complaint about our services within four weeks, you can file your complaint with the Disputes Committee for the Legal Profession. You may also take this route if we have not responded to your complaint in writing within four weeks of receiving the complaint. You then have a maximum of twelve months within which to file your complaint with the Disputes Committee for the Legal Profession. This option lapses after twelve months. The Disputes Committee will handle the case in accordance with the Regulations of the Disputes Committee for the Legal Profession that apply at the time of submission of the complaint to the Disputes Committee. If the dispute concerns an assignment by a private client, the regulations provide for a binding opinion, unless you appeal to the ordinary court within a month after the settlement of the complaint by our firm.
13. Our firm can submit unpaid invoices to the Disputes Committee for the Legal Profession for collection. In the event of a collection of a debt from a private client, this will result only in a binding opinion if the client deposits the outstanding amount under the Disputes Committee. If the client fails do to this, the collection will be subject to arbitration. If the dispute concerns an assignment by a corporate client, the Regulations will provide for arbitration.
14. Your assignment can be regarded as terminated if one of the following situations occurs: 1. if the legal assistance issued by the Legal Aid Council with regard to the assignment has been fully claimed; 2: if you receive the final invoice; 3. if you confirm to us or we confirm to you in writing that the assignment has been terminated. If the assignment has been terminated and you are of the opinion that you have not yet received all relevant documents, you must inform us of this within four weeks. After this period the file will be archived externally and requesting documents from the file will involve additional costs.
15. If and to the extent that you have not taken back the documents provided by you or by third parties, we will save the documents left with us for a maximum of five years. After this period we can destroy them without your permission. In the event of force majeure, we accept no liability for the loss of the file or of the documents provided to us. Force majeure includes theft, burglary, vandalism, terrorism, fire, lightning strike, water damage and flooding. In all other cases our liability is limited to a maximum of one hundred euros per client.
16. All agreements between you and Advocatenkantoor Bondam are governed exclusively by Dutch law. These general terms and conditions replace all previous versions. These terms and conditions have been drawn up in Dutch. In the event that translation results in possible differences in interpretation, the meaning of the Dutch version will prevail. We reserve the right to amend these terms and conditions. Once we have informed you of such amendment in writing and you have not objected to it within 14 days, you will be bound to it.
Drawn up in Wassenaar on 22 December 2006
effective from 1 January 2007
Mr O. C. Bondam
Advocatenkantoor Bondam
Schoolstraat 4, 2242 KH Wassenaar – The Netherlands
Tel. +31 (0)70 5141531 – fax +31 (0)70 5142365 - www. bondam.com