Contracts are usually a private matter between the people who make them — but business rarely works that cleanly. Deals are often structured to benefit someone who never signed: a subsidiary, a buyer's lender, a named beneficiary. As a solicitor you need to know precisely when such a person can enforce a term, when they can't, and how to draft so your client keeps control. Getting this wrong can hand rights to people you never intended to benefit — or deny them to people you did.
This lesson builds the full picture, step by step:
- Privity and the 1999 Act — the basic rule that only parties can sue, and the main statutory exception that changes it.
- Establishing an Enforcement Right — the two routes a third party uses to claim, and how they must be identified.
- Crystallisation, Variation and Rescission — when a third party's right becomes fixed and can no longer be taken away.
- Defences, Remedies and Double Recovery — what the promisor can argue back, what the third party can claim, and how overlapping claims are reconciled.
- Assignment — transferring an existing contractual right to someone new, and the conditions for doing it properly.
- Other Routes and Distinctions — agency, collateral contracts and statutory exceptions, plus how all this differs from being a full party.