How legal are your Corporate Authorised Representative / Authorised Representative Agreements? Take the quiz

In October 2016, we published a brief article entitled "Is your Standard Form Contract bullet proof?". That article was prepared immediately prior to the changes to the Unfair Contracts regime contained within the Australian Consumer Law which came into effect on 12 November 2016.

Since then we have reviewed a substantial number of Corporate Authorised Representative (CAR) Agreements and Authorised Representative (AR) Agreement which are currently in use by Financial Services Licensees. Very often, the director of the CAR is an AR of the licensee and the terms of the AR Agreement mirror the terms of the CAR Agreement.

From what we've seen, a great many contain terms which are, in our view, likely to be held by a Court or Tribunal to be unenforceable and likely to be struck out of the CAR and AR Agreements if challenged.