In this paper we investigate weak contact relations C on a lattice L, in particular, the relation between various axioms for contact, and their connection to the algebraic structure of the lattice. Furthermore, we will study a notion of orthogonality which is motivated by a weak contact relation in an inner product space. Although this is clearly a spatial application, we will show that, in case L is distributive and C satisfies the orthogonality condition, the only weak contact relation on L is the overlap relation; in particular no RCC model satisfies this condition.