The Swiss Federal Court decision 4A_232/2011 demonstrates the drastic consequences that can arise when a contractor fails to comply with contractual requirements. A contractor had to inform the customer that the nearly completed equipment would not be able to fully satisfy the contractually guaranteed performance. The customer did not accept this and rescinded the contract in accordance with Art. 366, para. 1 CO. The contractor requested payment for the completed portion of the equipment, but to no avail. Both the Commercial Court and Federal Court rejected in its entirety his claim of 370,000 francs.

In a somewhat surprising position, the Swiss Federal Court awarded brokerage fees to a real estate broker. It is astonishing because the buyer – as the seller’s tax adviser – knew the seller well. The buyer was looking to purchase property, but out of professional ethical reasons, did not inform the seller and purchased the property because there was no other interested party. Because the seller also used the broker as an information broker, there was no need for a psychological connection between the broker’s activities and the decision to purchase. Although the buyer and seller had a lot to do with each other but never actually spoke about the property purchase, it was sufficient that the broker informed the seller about the buyer to claim the fee in excess of 100,000 francs.

In its decision 4D_75/2011, the Swiss Federal Court ruled in favour of a company’s claim for remuneration for an unwritten work order for additional excavation activity. Although the contract stipulated that additional services would not be remunerated without a prior written work order (the written form requirement), the client’s participation at relevant meetings and lack of objection to meeting minutes led to an implied waiver of the written form requirement and tacit approval of the additional costs.

A technical problem in the system with which applicants can enter their applications for new generic top level domains (called "TAS")  has resulted in the partial disclosure of user names and file names of applicants to other applicants. ICANN has therefore taken the TAS offline on the last day of the application period and has not put the TAS back online since. Therefore, the publication of the applications has not occurred on April 30 as planned and we are expecting the publication to occur at the earliest at the end of May. The number of users of the TAS has been published in the meantime - with 1268 users, the number of applications for gTLDs may be greater than first expected.

At the 19th "three countries meeting" of the German Association of Law and Informatics (DGRI) in Zurich on 4 May 2012, Alexander Schmid gives a presentation on the topic "Technical Enforcement of License Agreements".

In the latest IT Newsletter, Urs Egli and Anne Koller-Dolivo summarize the most important aspects of employee lending. Crucial for understanding this is the cross-sectoral Collective Labor Agreement (CLA) regarding the lending of employees that was declared as generally binding on January 1, 2012. If a company lends out its employees and falls within the scope of the new CLA, then the CLA’s general conditions must now also be respected.

In a recently published article, Urs Egli explains why common law contracts generally are much more detailed than Swiss law agreements.

In his new epartners newsletter, Christoph Isler illustrates the relevancy of harmonized technical standards and describes the rules of Swiss law regarding the resolution of conflicts between manufacturers and the relevant supervisory authority.

In an article that was published recently, Alexander Schmid gives an overview over the application procedure set up by ICANN with respect to new generic top level domains and explains what companies not applying for a gTLD should do to safeguard their rights.

Dr. Urs Egli has published a white paper on the evaluation of outsourcing strategies. The white paper sets out the pros and cons of outsourcing strategies with a special focus on IT governance issues.