As a business owner, you will find many uses for contracts. They exist between companies, contract employees and providers of various services. In order to keep your contract as airtight as possible, it is important to cover your bases.
A severability clause can help you do that. What exact purpose do these clauses serve, and what do you as a business owner need to know about them?
Uses of a severability clause
Cornell Law School discusses the use of a severability clause. The purpose of this clause is essential to ensure that if one provision in your contract fails, the rest of the contract remains intact and salvageable. Only the bad provision needs to get taken out of the equation or dealt with. The one exemption is if the bad provision actually impacts the rest of the contract. In that case, you will likely need to start from scratch after all.
What is a bad provision?
But if that is not the case, you can focus on the removal of the bad provision. A provision may end up bad for numerous reasons. For example, a law in your state of employment may actually legally disallow something covered in the contract. A worker may also end up unable to follow through on a provision due to local law, religious exemption or so on.
No matter why a court deems a provision unenforceable, you can quickly move on with a project in the event that you have a severability clause in place. Otherwise, you could end up spending more time, resources and money on crafting new documents from scratch.
