Modelling Contracts and Agency; What The Law Says About It

Hello everyone, this is a continuation of my last post. Please read, learn and enjoy.

Consideration

Another element of a valid contract is consideration. What consideration basically talks about is that there must be an exchange of promises or of a promise for an act. Something of value in the eyes of the Law must be given for a promise in order to make it enforceable as a contract. What this simply means is that for a person who is a party to a contract be entitled to sue another person who is also a party to the same contract, he must show that he contributed to the agreement.
A valuable consideration in the eye of the Law may consist of some right, interest, profit or benefit to be enjoyed by a party to a contract or some loss or responsibility given suffered, given or undertaken by the other. For example, I talked about agency fees. Standard agencies do not ask models for agency fees but instead invest in their models, book them for jobs and get the money invested back after the Model is paid for the job. The money initially invested by the agency is some sort of loss or responsibility, so therefore, that is known as consideration. The money that was initially invested on the Models for shoots, to create a portfolio and comp card although I don’t think money is spent on getting models jobs is like some sort of benefit or profit to the Models. So if an agency wants to prove that there was indeed a valid contract, he just needs to show that some amount was spent on you initially. So consideration is basically one party to a contract enjoying some benefit while the other party suffers some loss or shoulders some responsibility.
There are certain instances where there is in fact no consideration even though it looks like it. This is what is know as failure of consideration. For example, an agency promises to book a model for jobs, the agency fails to do so, so therefore, there is no consideration. Why? Because the agency who made the promise did not in fact carry out any act in fulfilment of its promise. Although there are certain instances where a promise is made by a person to another although no act is required to be carried out by the other party a promise was made to.
Another instance of failure of consideration is where the parties to the contract are required to do some things as stated out in the contract and one of the parties is yet to fulfil his part of the agreement. For example, an agency when you signed the contract asked you to lose some pounds or cut your hair which is clearly stated in the agreement. The Model refuses to do so and the agency refused to book the Models for jobs. The Model cannot subsequently sue the agency for not getting him jobs because the Model is yet to fulfil his part of the contract of which the agency can only be liable when the Model does his part of the agreement and therefore there is no valid contract.
Now we are going to consider Adequacy of Consideration. In the absence of fraud, duress, force, misrepresentation, the consideration agreed by the two parties is adequate in the eyes of the Law. For example if the contract contains a term that says a Model shall get 60% of every income made by him from jobs and the agency gets 40%, so far the agency did not force you to sign the contract, there was nothing fishy about the agreement, the term was in plain and clear language, the Model cannot later come around and say the 60/40 cut is cheating, it is not enough.... For example, the job you were booked for is 20,000, and the percentage you get is 60%, that is like 12,000 naira. So when you calculate all the expenses you incur and you compare it to what you will be paid and you see that it is in fact not enough. You cannot complain that the money is not enough or it is ‘chicken change' if you agreed to the term and no one forced your hand to sign the contract, the Law will see it as adequate irrespective. In principle, no consideration is too small, too much or unfair in the eyes of the Law as far as it has been agreed by both parties. And lastly, although consideration need not be adequate, it must be sufficient in the eyes of the Law.

OK so this is where I am going to stop for now, please stay tuned for more.