Freelancer’s Guide to Contracts

I recently had the privilege of sharing my knowledge and expertise with freelancers looking to avoid common pitfalls associated with starting a business. Understanding that smaller businesses and startups don’t have much budgeted for legal and contracts, I sought to educate them on boilerplate legal clauses, what every contract should have as a basic foundation, so they can determine a good template from a bad one.

While I was giving my presentation, my new site eCommLegal launched to provide pre-packaged contracts, specific to online product and service businesses, e-Commerce, freelance web devs, hosting companies, etc. The first package features a customizable Professional Service Agreement, Statement of Work and Independent Contractor Agreement, drafted by a tech attorney familiar and working in the Open Source community with complete instructions and explanations for how to customize your contracts. This is the perfect start-up contract package for freelancers looking to protect themselves with client and vendor contracts, and it will be available for $100 off with Coupon Code WCMIA until 3/24.

In the workshop, we addressed issues like the fact that oral contracts can be enforced by courts, looking at the parties actions, that’s why it’s imperative to get things in writing, so there is a clear and unambiguous understanding, and less to argue over or litigate. I made sure attendees knew to double check the party they were contracting with’s legal status with the Division of Corporations because people make mistakes, and sometimes don’t know whether they’re an LLC or an Inc., what state they’re headquartered in, so you want to make sure you are contracting with the proper party, with the ability to sue the company with the actual assets if something should go wrong.