Comment by ihumanable | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ihumanable | Hacker News Reader

As someone getting started in the Freelancing / Consulting world and trying to figure out how you are supposed to do things the "right way" this was a really accessible, fun, and valuable piece to watch, definitely worth the time.

I do have some questions for the HN community if anyone has some advice, thanks in advance.

What's the best way to go about contracts, especially form contracts. Most of the work I do is the same kind of thing and normally the only variables are rate / duration / deliverables. Is the best way to go about this to find a lawyer and have him draft something that I can just drop "$rate / $time" for "$durationOfProject" into.

Is it best to go to the lawyer with some sort of draft in hand already or should you let them do all the work? Can anyone point to some good resources for boilerplate contracts?

Anyways, it's all very new and confusing and exciting, just trying not to fuck it up too badly. Thanks for any advice.

I am not a lawyer, but what mine did for my firm is create a Master Services Agreement (MSA) that I use as a starting point for all my clients. Some of the things that I think are important to include are:

* Stipulation of ownership and licensing for the deliverables.

* Confidentiality

* Disclaimer of warranties (Software provided as is)

* Limitation of liability

* Acceptance terms for deliverables

In my experience the money that I spent having a qualified lawyer who understands small business and intellectual property prepare and support my use of this agreement has been very helpful. The right lawyer will have a draft that he can start with and modify for your requirements.

You can also work with your lawyer to determine the right way to organize your firm (LLC/S-Corp/etc).

At $250 it's not cheap, but there's a lot of really great process and information in the Sitepoint Web Design Business Kit; including sample contracts.

It's kind of like a franchise kit for freelancers.

Obie Fernandez has one as well, for $100. He also has a few lectures on the topic on Vimeo.

You can also ask Gabe questions directly at http://mylawyergabe.com/

Okay, the lawyer in that clip explains nicely how mule's stock contracts have points designed to be negotiated in them that are "nice to have protections" that aren't mandatory.

Another way (especially if you're not working with sophisticated counter-parties) is to have very little of those if any, but instead try to keep it short and sweet.

When you go to a lawyer, it really depends on what you ask for: Their legal ethics somewhat dictate for them to be overprotective. So if you are afraid of scaring the hell out of people, you have to tell them to tone down the parts you want to be more toned down, how you want more X then Y, etc, and get across your actual goals of the process.

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