Correspondence: Ewan Nettleton, Bristows, 3 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3AA, UK. Tel: +44 20 7400 8000; Fax: +44 20 7400 8050; e-mail: ewan.nettleton@bristows.com

¹is a solicitor in the Intellectual Property Department at Bristows. He specialises in Intellectual Property Law. He has an MA in Chemistry and a DPhil in Protein Chemistry and is particularly interested in matters relating to the IT and pharmaceutical industries.

²is a solicitor in the Commercial Litigation Department at Bristows. He has a BA in Modern History and specialises in contentious matters, assisting and advising on a range of contractual and other commercial disputes.

Abstract

Outsourcing is a common practice in the database marketing industry, with companies outsourcing marketing functions to database marketers and database marketers outsourcing a variety of functions themselves. But what happens if the relationship breaks down to a point where one of the parties does not want it to continue even if the other does? The recent case of Vertex v Powergen is a useful reminder of the courts' discretion about whether to order specific performance of a contract to get the parties to do what they agreed to. This paper discusses the High Court's decision in Vertex and considers the situations in which database marketing companies might want to consider seeking orders for specific performance and the likelihood of such orders being made.