Best efforts

The JC’s guide to writing nice.™ →Go uptown Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Plain English Drafting Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Best efforts
/bɛst ˈɛfəts/ (n.)

For pompouser types, “best endeavours” — “efforts” and “endeavours” being interchangeable — Rhodia International Holdings Ltd v Huntsmann International [2007] EWHC 292 (Comm) held that “reasonable endeavours” requires the person on the Clapham omnibus only “endeavour” down a single avenue of reasonableness. That having resulted in a dead-end, there is no further cause to wander up and down thoroughfares, however reasonable they may in the abstract be, to discharge one’s obligation.

By contrast, a “best endeavours” obligation requires the fabled bus passenger to alight and go down every one of the avenues that seems reasonable, before stuffing that for a game of soldiers, to exhaust the lot of them.

“All reasonable endeavours” on this logic, is the same as “best endeavours”. It requires money down in the pursuit of real and active, reasonable, effort.

See also

• Best reasonable efforts
• Worst reasonable efforts