The facts are a bit complicated, involving circumstances surrounding the failure of a bank and transactions in the bank’s loans preceding the failure as well as transactions of the FDIC as the bank’s receiver.

Here’s a simplified timeline: FH Partners made a demand on the debtor for payment of the loan and eventually sued the debtor and guarantors.

You remember that your lawyer once told you that without a contract you do not legally own your website. Finally you prepare the contract and your designer agrees to sign it. Should it be dated when the contract is signed or back when you first started working together? The reason contract dates are important is because that is when your legal rights begin.

For example, if the contract is dated today, who owns that portion of the website code that was developed prior to signing the agreement? So, you paid the designer in full but you don’t own the website?

Your state or country may also have specific rules or regulations.

The need to document transactions is partly based on commercial necessity, and partly on legal necessity.

For a shorter piece with a few practical tips see Backdating – it’s illegal isn’t it?

Setting aside such issues, avoiding unwanted side effects of backdating contracts can be tricky, especially when the purported effective date of an agreement is several months before the date it was actually signed, as can be seen in involves the ownership of a promissory note that was made to a bank in connection with a loan.

It’s not unusual for parties to a contract to want the written agreement to cover a period before it’s actually signed.

There are any number of contexts where this comes up — some legitimate and others not exactly aboveboard — but the logistics of negotiating and signing contracts are such that the issue is unavoidable.