Routine Maintenance & Legal Resources for Golf Courses
Direct access to legal counsel with intimate knowledge of your facility is an important resource for any country club.
Legal agreements between members, vendors, partners, and for corporate events and weddings abound. The mission is Risk management in pursuit of fairness in each of these contracts.
However, things have likely changed from back when certain agreements were created or negotiated.
Legal resources for golf courses allow for a consistent cadence of contract review to help to ensure continued fairness.
Even with the most expert foresight, there are factors that have probably shifted positioning and leverage. The club is best served tending to the legal language in these documents through a legal review or audit on a routine basis to be sure original intent hasn’t fallen out of favor.
Evaluating Contractual Obligations
Trained eyes evaluating current contractual obligations only serves to help improve a clubs status.
For example, equity membership agreements with obligations to pay back existing members can pose problems as rates for membership decrease.
Paying out $50,000 for each member you take in for $20,000 isn’t a good position.
Under certain circumstances, of course with appropriate member ratification, language in the bylaws can be crafted to alleviate this burden. This can be the only way out for some clubs. When the case is made intelligently, the decision becomes an easy one.
At the end of the day, many buyers will not consider purchasing golf courses with exit payout provisions because of the liability it presents.
Vendor contractual agreements are also worth careful inspection. When procurement processes become more relaxed over time, contracts tend to be increasingly one-sided – auto renewals, cancellation clauses, term lengths, etc. Sound legal advice and procurement strategy can help to hold your vendors’ feet to the fire when it comes to pursuit of fairness in longer-term agreements and subscriptions.
Legal Resources for Golf Courses