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Some of our customers are in the UK and some of the work we do is in the UK. I am wondering whether Irish/English law has priority or whether we have to adhere to UK law at all with our overseas customers.

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Some of our customers are in the UK and some of the work we do is in the UK. I am wondering whether Irish/English law has priority or whether we have to adhere to UK law at all with our overseas customers.

If your contract says that Irish law would apply, then you should not need to adhere to UK law in your relationships with UK customers. The Rome Regulation (“RR”) is a convention used to determine which law governs contracts within EU member states. Under the RR, the parties to a contract can choose the law of that contract which means that the parties can decide what country’s laws apply to the contract. Once this is stated, there is generally no need to comply with foreign laws.

However, there are exceptions in the RR to this rule, for example, if your customers in the UK were consumers then they could claim UK consumer law applies to their relationship with you.

The RR also says that certain mandatory rules of law may still apply notwithstanding that the law of the contract has been specified in the contract. Thus, you should be aware that a UK customer might look to rely on mandatory UK law, notwithstanding that the contract is subject to Irish law.

We sometimes ask English lawyers to review Irish law agreements from a mandatory law perspective to limit this risk.

One mandatory rule might be data protection law, which means that under the RR an individual in the UK could look to enforce rights under UK data protection law against your company. However, while this is something that you have to be aware of, it does not mean you have to comply with UK law. If fact, if you already comply with Irish data protection law, this may mean that you comply with many of the provisions of the UK data protection acts as the Irish and UK data protection laws derive from the same EU directive.

Answered by

Peter O' Neill

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Some of our customers are in the UK and some of the work we do is in the UK. I am wondering whether Irish/English law has priority or whether we have to adhere to UK law at all with our overseas customers.

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Answered by

Peter O' Neill

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