Ernst Ploi, Attorney-at-law, Austria
It’s all in the words.
I camped out in the Great Hall during the ERC as this was
where all the speeches and discussions on loans and insurance were going to
take place. These are topics I’m not overly confident on and here was a chance
to spend entire days being bombarded with useful and invaluable information -
glutton for punishment I know!
Most of the loan agreements I work with are long term and
historic. Whilst digging around in the files I’ve come across half page
documents with little more than lender and item details (generally not the
signed versions either!) and 10 pages of legalese. So when a session was
describing its self as “loan agreements are becoming more and more
comprehensive and complicated. Does this have to happen?” I’ve seen the paperwork
that proves the first part and with many of our loans to private individuals
who don’t speak ‘legalese’. I was keen to know if there really had to be pages
of Terms and Conditions to a loan.
Ernest Ploil spoke of how previously one or two sentence
clause have mutated into wordy multiple paragraphs. Where once a phrase along
the lines of ‘the borrower will do everything to look after and care for an
item’ was sufficient, it is now the ‘Borrower must do this and this, but not
that and if they inform the lender first, in writing then that might be
allowable’.
And that’s just the traditional stuff – what about the new
things? Immunity from seizure clauses were never considered before and now add
more details. It’s no longer appropriate to simply say that the lender signs
over reproduction rights, the details of which rights and how the images can be
used must be outlined and agreed.
By the end it felt like the answer to ‘does it have to be
this complicated’ was that whilst the Terms and Conditions are over lawyered
and even passed from document to document the answer is a begrudging yes…
…But perhaps in the future we may see consistent and simpler
loan agreements.
Rowann Goldsmith
Collection Registrar, National Trust.
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