IANAL, but I took a commerical law class in college. I feel like I remember there being a doctrine that if there's a written contract, agreements outside of the contract don't matter. (Which is not to say that verbal contracts aren't real contracts, but that if there's also a written contract, they overrule any unwritten agreements.)
> if there's also a written contract, they overrule any unwritten agreements
That typically only applies in situations where the agreement is otherwise ambiguous. The most common example being "A: We verbally agreed to $1 and I signed. B: But what you signed say $1.10" often in these situations the written contract win.
However in this case they are in a written format explicitly clarifying the contents of the contract which you are allowed to do as long as the interpretation you agree to doesn't meaningfully diverge from what was written in a way that doesn't follow standard practice. As the doctor said it is common practice to avoid consuming alcohol with medicine that has known interactions with it. Even if the original contract is unambiguous no one is going to side against OP on the topic of "we both agreed that it meant when taking certain medicines" since the original verbiage didn't follow standard practice by the clarified verbiage did.
Agreements over an electronic messaging system are written agreements, and satisfy the statute of frauds, and are not automatically superseeded.
Even if you have a written contract that has boilerplate language saying all future modifications need to be in writing, courts have enforced verbal modifications. A contract can always be modified, what matters is if both parties agree.
Yes, but most of the things people are talking about here are not contracts, I think, so I don't think the doctrine you're referring to would be applicable. Compare these two situations:
Situation 1. There is a single document with the title "CONTRACT" signed by both parties. It starts with a list of definitions and continues with a list of things that each party promises to do.
Situation 2. There is a whole pile of documents to be signed by just one of the parties, the word "contract" is not mentioned, and most of the sentences in the documents give information (warning, disclaimer, whatever) rather than express some kind of obligation.
Some kind of (implicit) contract may be created in situation 2, and the documents may have some bearing on it, but the documents are clearly not "the contract".
It's more like signing to receive a parcel than signing a contract.
... What are you basing that on? In Canada at least that would absolutely be a contract.
We must be very careful not to confuse "common sense" or "obvious" or "that's what it intuitively means to me" with "law". Lots of people do that and lots of them pay the price :-(
You'll need a personal copy of that conversation if this were to come up. We don't know what their retention policy is, or if they'll mysteriously be unable to find it in a court case.
The only court case I could imagine this coming up in is for malpractice, where op suffered serious consequences for drinking alcohol and sued bc he wasn't told not to drink. I don't think the above message chain would help him win his case.
Yeah I figured there was relatively little legal risk here. I just wanted to point out that if your legal defense is the party at fault keeping support chat logs then you might want to rethink your legal defense :P
