An old friend sent me some documents this morning and it was a document of a landed property he purchased earlier this year in Lagos. He is a close friend so I was honestly a bit surprised and at the same time disappointed that he purchased a property without getting me involved as a lawyer only to call on me now that the transaction went south.
Here is the brief; He was to purchase the property but didn’t have the full cash at hand, the property cost eighty million naira and he deposited the sum of fifty million naira with the landlord, to pay up the balance of thirty million naira in three months time which is to be splitted into ten million naira per month.
In the contract of the sale which they executed, there was a clause that if he defaults in the payment he will not only lose the property but he will be liable for damages and he will lose 50% of the total money he had already paid.
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He failed to meet up with the payment schedule but was able to pay the total of seventy million naira out of the sell price of eighty million naira to the vendor but defaulted for just one month but the vendor went ahead and sold the property to another person. He therefore asked the vendor (the landlord) to refund him the seventy million naira he had paid but the landlord is insisting that he will only refund him half of the money as a clause in their agreement stated that he will keep 50% of the total money paid as damages if the buyer defaults in payment.
I read through the contract they executed and there was the clause of the buyer losing 50% of his deposit if he defaults in payment boldly written in the buyer’s covenants section. I asked him and he told me that they never negotiated on that and he had no idea that there was ever such a clause in the contract and that if he was aware of it he would not have ever accepted it.
What happened was that the seller was the person that drafted the contract and gave it to him to go and read through and sign. He did sign it without appreciating the content of the contract now he risks losing 50% of the total money he has paid added to the fact that he already lost the property.
I asked him why he didn’t tell me of the transaction or send me the document to review before he signed, he said he thought I might charge him just for me to review the document. Well, by him trying to avoid the tip he would have given me as a lawyer friend to help him review the transaction he stands to lose over 35 million naira now including other stress and headache.
This case is typical of many people. They always try to avoid lawyers so that they don’t pay that meagre legal fee but end up getting caught up in bigger legal problems. If he is to drag this matter to court there is a high chance that he might lose the case because coupled with money he will spend as litigation cost the contract he signed is rock solid.
The importance of Involving a lawyer in agreements especially agreements of high monetary value cannot be over emphasized. A lawyer would have drawn his attention to that clause and made sure that such clause is expunged from the contract but he tried to cut cost and to cut corners thinking that the document is written in English hence he can understand the content.
That one hundred thousand naira, two hundred thousand naira or one million naira that you will give a lawyer to help you review the document will save you from a lot of stress. Some lawyers can even collect as low as 50k or 20k from you.
Please always involve a lawyer and do not even say that you don’t know any lawyer, a simple google search for a keyword like “lawyers around me” will fetch you the contact details of a plethora of lawyers that are just a few kilometers away from you.