Secondee to none: how joint venture secondment agreements are often deeply flawed. Issue 2 (3rd April 2021) - Walker, Jacob
Abstract : We periodically benchmark joint venture (JV) legal and ancillary agreements to understand prevalent practices, and identify underappreciated risks and creative structures to inform JV practitioners. We recently benchmarked 25 cross-industry master secondment agreements (MSAs) against 28 terms. Most were silent on more than 50 per cent of terms we expected to see. This is critically important for natural resources (where up to 83 per cent of upstream production of major oil companies comes from JVs), and because secondees are seen in at least 80 per cent of JVs. We make the case that companies need to draft better MSAs, and provide guidance on improving secondee management without renegotiation.