Negotiations and the contract from a legal perspective

Both negotiations and a contract are important components of a collaboration. What is the status of a negotiation and of a contract? Will the costs incurred in the context of a negotiation be reimbursed, even if there is no contract yet? What do ‘contractual liability’ and ‘precontractual liability’ mean? Is ‘putting something in an e-mail’ sufficient, or should everything be on paper? In this manual, we examine the negotiations and the contract from a legal perspective.