BLAW2012 Applied Contract Law at Curtin University is assessed in a way that quietly asks for two different people. The examination rewards a student who can state and apply doctrine under time pressure.
BLAW2012 Applied Contract Law at Curtin University is assessed in a way that quietly asks for two different people. The examination rewards a student who can state and apply doctrine under time pressure. The written memo rewards someone else entirely: an adviser writing to a person who has to make a commercial decision and who does not care to be taught contract law along the way. Most students write both pieces as though the same reader were on the other end, and the memo is where that costs them. The clue is in the unit title. Applied means the law has to arrive somewhere, and somewhere is usually a decision about risk.
Author: MAAS Editorial Team · Reviewed by a Senior Commercial Law mentor (PhD, Contract and Commercial Law)
Last updated: 2026-08-18
Category: writing-tips
What does BLAW2012 actually cover?
Direct answer: BLAW2012 Applied Contract Law is a 25-credit undergraduate unit taught out of Curtin Law School. Curtin's published syllabus, as recorded in the handbook, covers the formation, negotiation and operation of contracts, the role and structure of the contents of a business contract including boilerplate and common clauses, risk management and termination clauses, the type and scope of contract remedies, and dispute resolution. Note that it carries a prerequisite: you need the introductory business law unit before you can take it.
Evidence: Read that syllabus closely and it is not a list of doctrine at all. Two of its five elements concern the document itself, its clauses and its risk management and termination provisions, rather than what a court would do afterwards. A unit that puts boilerplate and risk management on its own syllabus line is signalling that the useful question is often not who would win, but what should have been written into the agreement so the question never arose.
Example: A Vietnamese student at Curtin told his MAAS mentor that the unit felt like a list of unrelated topics that happened to share the word contract. His mentor asked him to write the topic list again as a timeline, from negotiation through to remedies. The list stopped looking like a syllabus and started looking like the life of an agreement, and the topics he had been memorising separately turned out to be sequential.
How is the unit assessed, and why does the split matter?
Direct answer: Curtin publishes assessment detail in the unit outline rather than in the handbook, so the only structure worth quoting is one attached to a named offering. In the version delivered online through Open Universities Australia, the split is an online multiple-choice component, a written memorandum, and a final examination, with the memo carrying the largest single share of the written work. Your own offering may differ and the unit outline is the authority. What is worth taking from a split like that is strategic rather than numerical, because the components test different things. The multiple-choice component tests whether you know the rules, the memo tests whether you can advise, and the examination tests whether you can do both quickly.
| Component, where a split like this applies | What it really tests | Where students go wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Multiple choice | Precision on rules and exceptions | Studying themes rather than elements |
| Written memo | Advice a business person can act on | Writing an essay about contract law |
| Final examination | Applied doctrine under time pressure | Running out of time on issue spotting |
Evidence: A unit that spreads weight across recall, applied writing and timed application is deliberately preventing a single study method from carrying a student through. Preparing for one component in the style of another is the most common structural mistake, and it is invisible until the mark comes back.
Example: A student who had done well in her earlier law unit prepared for the BLAW2012 memo the way she had prepared for essays, by reading widely around the topic. Her mentor's response was to take the reading away and hand her a single question instead: what is the client deciding, and what would change their mind? Her second draft was shorter, cited less, and scored considerably better.
What makes a memo different from an essay?
Direct answer: A memo is written to be used, not to be marked. It leads with the answer rather than building to it, it tells the reader what to do as well as what the law is, and it keeps the reasoning visible but subordinate to the recommendation. An essay can defensibly spend a page establishing context before arriving anywhere. A memo that does the same has failed at its job, because the reader in the scenario is a person deciding whether to sign, sue, settle or walk away.
Evidence: Legal writing scholarship draws a firm line between predictive writing, which advises a client on the likely outcome, and persuasive writing, which argues a position to a decision maker (Neumann et al., 2021). Advisory writing is expected to be candid about weakness, because a client who is only told the good news cannot make a real decision. A memo that reads as advocacy for the client's preferred outcome has confused the two genres.
Example: One student's memo concluded that the client had a strong case. His mentor asked what the other side would say first. He had not written it down anywhere. Adding two sentences acknowledging the strongest counter-argument, and explaining why it did not change the recommendation, did not weaken the memo. It was the difference between an assertion and advice.
How do you handle the facts without just retelling them?
Direct answer: Use facts as evidence, not as narrative. The client already knows what happened, so a memo that opens with a chronology is spending its most valuable space telling the reader something they told you. Facts should appear at the moment they do legal work, attached to the element they satisfy or defeat. If a fact in your memo is not doing that job, it is decoration.
Evidence: Contract doctrine is built from elements, and each element is a place where a fact either lands or does not. Agreement, consideration, intention and certainty each turn on identifiable conduct or words. Organising a memo around those elements rather than around the sequence of events is what makes the analysis auditable by a marker and useful to a client.
Example: A student submitted a draft in which the first six hundred words were a retelling of the dispute. Her mentor deleted the section and asked her to reintroduce each fact only where it proved something. Eleven facts came back. The rest, it turned out, had been in the draft because they were in the problem, not because they mattered.
Where does risk allocation change the analysis?
Direct answer: It changes what counts as a good answer. Doctrinal analysis asks what the position is now that the parties are in dispute. Risk allocation asks what the agreement should have said so that the position was never in doubt. Applied contract units reward students who can do both, because a commercial reader usually wants to know two things: where do we stand, and how do we stop this happening again. The second question is frequently where the higher marks sit and where most students write nothing at all.
Evidence: Curtin's syllabus lists risk management and termination clauses, and dispute resolution, as elements in their own right rather than as afterthoughts to remedies. A clause that limits liability, defines a term precisely, or specifies how a disagreement is escalated does more practical work than any remedy claimed after the fact, because remedies are what you are left with once the allocation has failed.
Example: A memo about a defective supply arrangement ended with an assessment of damages, which was accurate. The mentor's note was a single line asking what a better contract would have said. The student added a short closing section proposing a specific definition of the goods and a clear inspection window. It was the only part of the memo the marker commented on positively by name.
What separates a Credit answer from a Distinction one?
Direct answer: Certainty, honestly handled. Weaker answers state a conclusion with more confidence than the facts support, or hedge so thoroughly that no advice is given at all. Stronger answers identify precisely which fact is doing the deciding, say what would happen if that fact were different, and tell the reader what to find out next. A conclusion that names its own weak point reads as competence rather than doubt.
Evidence: Predictive legal advice is by nature probabilistic, since the point is to estimate an outcome before a court has ruled. Advice that presents a probability as a certainty misrepresents the state of knowledge, and in an assessment context it also removes the student's opportunity to show the reasoning that a marker is trying to see.
Example: Two students reached the same conclusion on the same problem. One wrote that the term would be held to be a condition. The other wrote that it would likely be held to be a condition, that the outcome turned on how essential the timing was to the buyer at formation, and that evidence of the pre-contract discussions would settle it. The second answer earned the higher mark, and it was not because it was longer.
How should you prepare across the study period?
Direct answer: Build the element checklists early and keep a case list that records what each case decided rather than what it was about. For the memo, draft the recommendation first and let the analysis be assembled to support it, then check that every paragraph earns its place against that recommendation. For the examination, practise spotting issues under time pressure rather than rereading notes, because the failure mode in a timed contract paper is almost never ignorance and almost always triage.
Evidence: The rules in contract law are finite and heavily structured, which means the marginal value of a fourth reading of the notes is close to zero while the marginal value of a first timed attempt is large. Units assessed partly by multiple choice reward exactly this kind of precision drilling, because the distractors in a well-written question target the exception rather than the rule.
Example: A student who had read the unit materials three times sat his first practice paper a week out and finished barely half of it. His mentor's only intervention was to make him do three more under the clock. His accuracy did not improve much. His coverage nearly doubled, and coverage was what had been costing him.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a law background to take BLAW2012?
You need the introductory business law unit, which is a listed prerequisite, so some prior legal study is assumed rather than none. Beyond that the unit is built for business students rather than for law students. What it demands is a willingness to work with precise language, since in contract law a small difference in wording often changes the result.
How many cases should I cite in the memo?
Enough to support each step of the reasoning and no more. A memo that cites twenty cases usually shows reading rather than judgement. Citing the authority that actually decides your point, and explaining why it applies to these facts, is worth more than a list.
Should the memo cover arguments against my client?
Yes. Advisory writing is expected to be candid, and a client who does not know the weakness in their position cannot make a real decision. Acknowledging the strongest counter-argument and explaining why it does not change the recommendation strengthens the advice.
Is the multiple-choice component worth serious preparation?
It is worth precise preparation rather than long preparation. Questions of this kind tend to turn on exceptions and on the boundaries between elements, so drilling the distinctions is more useful than rereading the topic summaries.
Can MAAS help me with BLAW2012?
Yes. MAAS Academic Mentoring coaches you through the unit with the Outline → Draft → Final model, including issue mapping, memo structure, authority selection and timed examination practice with mentors from a commercial law background. We coach your work; we do not write it for you.
Ready to write a BLAW2012 memo someone could act on?
If you know the law and the memo still comes back marked as descriptive, the problem is usually the reader you had in mind rather than the research you did. MAAS Academic Mentoring works alongside you through Outline → Draft → Final so the legal reasoning stays yours while the advice becomes usable. Every engagement is backed by our three-tier outcome guarantee (Pass / Merit / Distinction) and a 90-day warranty.
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Related guides
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- BUS301 Business Law assignment guide: reasoning from legislation and decided cases in an Australian business law unit
- MAAS Academic Mentoring service: 1:1 coaching with PhD-level mentors in your discipline
- Course-code assignment coaching: pillar guide on tackling any unit assignment with a MAAS mentor
References
- Carter, J. W. (2018). Contract law in Australia (7th ed.). LexisNexis Butterworths.
- Neumann, R. K. Margolis, E. & Stanchi, K. M. (2021). Legal reasoning and legal writing (9th ed.). Aspen Publishing.
- Paterson, J. Robertson, A. & Duke, A. (2020). Principles of contract law (6th ed.). Thomson Reuters.
Tools & resources
- Curtin University. (2019). Courses handbook: BLAW2012 Applied Contract Law. Retrieved August 18, 2026, from https://archive.handbook.curtin.edu.au/july2019/units/31/318736.html
- Curtin University. (n.d.). Referencing at Curtin. Retrieved August 18, 2026, from https://libguides.library.curtin.edu.au/referencing
- Australasian Legal Information Institute. (n.d.). AustLII. Retrieved August 18, 2026, from https://www.austlii.edu.au
This article is part of the MAAS Journal series for Vietnamese international students. MAAS Academic Mentoring is an advisory partner; we coach students through the Outline → Draft → Final delivery model with developmental feedback from PhD-level mentors. We do not write or submit work on a student's behalf.