Here are a couple sources I've found:
- Common Paper (NDA, TOS, SLA, DPA, CSA, ...)
- YC Safe (Fundraising)
- Clerky (Fundraising, Employment, ...)
Looking for more resources like these.
Here's the post where they describe it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36043944
here's another one: https://www.avodocs.com/
Our docs are free, released under creative comments, have been downloaded more than 17,000 times and used to close millions of dollars worth of deals.
If you’re not sure what kind of contract you need, this blog post might help:
Out of interest, is that a permanent(ish) decision, or are you intending to use that as a spring board, eventually aiming for industry-agnostic?
Thanks
Some of our agreements, like the NDA, are already used in other industries since they are more industry agnostic
Else, was going to turn to the GPTs and see what they may muster, but any even general direction pointers would be appreciated?
I think with legal docs generally, you have to decide what the stakes are and act accordingly. In general, keep in mind that most lawyers won't take a case unless there's someone with deep pockets to sue. So for that $20k loan you give to a friend, a boilerplate template is fine; if they don't want to pay you back, a lawsuit is gonna cost you more than the loan anyway. You've got a new startup for website monitoring with 20 customers? Worry about growing your userbase, not the remote chance that you get sued and something in the boilerplate docs you used wasn't worded properly (of course, once you raise significant money or have significant revenue, those legal docs become much more important, and also this doesn't apply if you are working on something with significant risk, such as a medical device).
But child custody isn't one of those things. It is high stakes, the chances that your counterparty will sue you are very high, and a bad outcome might be one of the worst things that can happen to you. Personally, the possibility of losing custody of my children would be much more worrying to me than any financial lawsuit.
The pockets that fund this behavior will be empty at some point. But until then, primal irrational impulses are running the show.
In a case like that, the difference between the right legal docs and the mostly right docs would be huge.
(have volunteered some time as a guardian ad litem, and most in my circle are divorced, from the homeless to a billionaire)
Maybe thats a poor example - but forms help thats not spammy, but also not "starting a business related"
Legal resources online all seem so "Better Call Saul" quality. Like going to a used car lot.
https://helloprenup.com/ https://hellodivorce.com/ https://www.getdynasty.com/ https://trustandwill.com/
I haven't personally used those services, but the founders are great
this seems ripe for disaster. hopefully, you weren't serious. as with all things, I'd really hope anything in the realm of legal documents from GPT would be then consulted with an actual lawyer
I just want to ensure that documents are formatted properly... that was all.
All of our standard agreements are released under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. More details on that license here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
For employment matters, SHRM's "Tools and Samples" resources are good.
Thompson Reuters has a free 7 day trial of their "Practical Law" product, though I haven't explored it personally.
Techcontracts.com is a good resource.
ETA: these are all starting points - the docs always have to be reviewed and modified for your particular circumstances. But they’re reasonable for the first draft.
(I do outside general counsel work for small startups)
Good luck!
Quite a lot of the founders from the mentioned links/startup/companies are friends or part of a cohort. This is a like an Inbox and I might need to keep cleaning them up.
For example, here are his employment/hiring docs: https://squareoneforms.com/
However, if you want to start something big, it's better to find a lawyer to draft your legal documents, especially the ones you publish online (from a lawyer).
A lawyer. A lawyer. A lawyer. A lawyer. END OF STORY.
And I'm saying that from a perspective of someone who used to use free/cheap template docs a long time ago.
The hard reality is that free/cheap ready-made docs are highly unlikely to be suitable for your business context for one or more of the following reasons:
- Jurisdiction of you or your clients
- Insurance requirements from your insurer or your clients insurer
- Clauses not there that should be there
- Clauses there that are not good enough
- Clauses there that should not be there
Paying a lawyer to help you with legal documents is a necessary business expense. Just like paying taxes, either you pay upfront or you pay the penalty later.
I've spent six figures on legal fees easily, and I also use templates and off the shelf stuff all the time. Clerky is a good resource and is fine for most core stuff.
You just can't pay lawyers every time you do everything, it's a waste of resources for small simple businesses that may never go anywhere. And the other issues is EVEN IF YOU DO that doesn't guarantee anything, most lawyers are just using THEIR templates anyways and charging more. If you don't know what to ask for you and don't yet understand the business dynamics you really get almost no value add from having an actual lawyer.
I'm currently paying a law firm about $20k to rewrite a bunch of docs that I used templates for about 5 years ago. I consider that a success, the business now has millions in revenue and can afford it and it's fine. That's a pretty normal sequence of events in business.
As per my original post. That statement is one made from the comfortable armchair of somebody who has not had to litigate off the back of a free/cheap ready-made contract.
What is a waste of resources is paying a lawyer to try to get you off the hook for something that could have reasonably been in the contract in the first place had you had it drafted for your specific business context rather than relying on some shit internet template.
> most lawyers are just using THEIR templates anyways and charging more.
This is bullshit and you know it.
Yes, lawyers use base templates, but that's because there are some clauses that will always need to be there no matter what. However the devil is in the details and the lawyers also sit down with you to understand your business context and those templates get edited, sometimes heavily edited depending on the business context.
The point is that you are paying the lawyer for their experience. They know what should be kept in the template. They know what should be removed from the template. They know what should be added to the template AND they know how to add stuff to the templates in a legally correct manner.
You claim to have spent time with lawyers drafting legal documents, ergo you should know that and not spread FUD.
People who have actually hired lawyers and litigated things know what a shit show it all is.
> As per my original post. That statement is one made from the comfortable armchair of somebody who has not had to litigate off the back of a free/cheap ready-made contract.
I've done exactly that. You can create a contract by two people writing down what they agree on in bullet points and have it be binding and litigate it if you want instead too. It's actually pretty normal. Legal docs aren't magic, they're words that represent agreement between humans, and in litigation usually what's going on is a bunch of humans trying to figure out which narrative best represents the actual underlying agreement between the people in question.
> What is a waste of resources is paying a lawyer to try to get you off the hook for something that could have reasonably been in the contract in the first place had you had it drafted for your specific business context rather than relying on some shit internet template.
Even more of a waste of resources is paying a lawyer to sort of kind of pay attention for a few minutes to your requests before assuming you're like some other situation he's seen and giving you that person's template and charging you $3,500. Which is generally what happens to people if they don't know what they're doing.
Or, alternately, paying $25,000 for a real firm with domain expertise who do actually listen to you and successfully craft a great customized document that does in fact slightly improve on the template you would have used. And then none of those things ever actually happen and it doesn't end up mattering anyways.
> Yes, lawyers use base templates, but that's because there are some clauses that will always need to be there no matter what. However the devil is in the details and the lawyers also sit down with you to understand your business context and those templates get edited, sometimes heavily edited depending on the business context.
> The point is that you are paying the lawyer for their experience. They know what should be kept in the template. They know what should be removed from the template. They know what should be added to the template AND they know how to add stuff to the templates in a legally correct manner.
Yeah sure, that's possible. But in order to get good legal work you have to know what to ask for, and you have to be working with the right lawyer.
Most people aren't going to be good at either of those two things, and working from templates is quite likely to lead to better outcomes for those people at a tiny fraction of the cost.
Different parties cover these two points in all sorts of ways. You're right, it doesn't necessarily make sense to hire an attorney when the parties are on equal footing, experienced, clearly understand each other's duties, and don't really disagree on how to proceed should an issue arise.
It's kind of like hiring a designer/firm for a website. Some will overcharge for a Wordpress template or they might charge big fees to give you a robust solution that is extreme overkill for your application. But, if you find the right designer/attorney, they will work with you to meet your financial and business needs. That seems to be the hardest part.
And even then you should still read it and become intimately knowledgeable with each provision
Yup. I've had one or two clients make all sorts of threats at me, accusing me of stuff when it was caused by their inactions.
But then funnily enough, when they finally get round to paying their lawyers to look at the contract they signed, they find they don't have a leg to stand on or at least they'll struggle to make a worthwhile case.
Yup.
This is precisely one of the points I was getting at.
If your business has liability insurance and ESPECIALLY if your business has professional indemnity insurance, then really you have zero option but to pay a lawyer to draft a contract.
Read the proposal form you signed. Read the small print of the insurance. And most important of all, remember how insurance works, the insurance company expects you to have made a reasonable effort to mitigate your losses.
By being a cheapskate and using a free/cheap ready-made template from the internet, the insurance company would be well within their rights to argue that you had not made a reasonable effort to mitigate your losses and the loss adjusters will adjust your payout downwards accordingly.
What kind of lawsuits (and need for liability insurance) should be expected for a software SaaS with a TOS that basically says "we're not liable for anything...". As every software terms state (grumble).
From the sound of it, seems you two are talking about providing something moderately mission critical.
And therein lies the problem.
You may think that stating "we're not liable for anything" is an easy get out of jail free card.
The reality is that drafting LOL (Limitation Of Liability) clauses is an artform that evolves constantly inline with emerging case-law in your jurisdiction.
You see, there's this little problem of someone called a judge.
Judges tend not to like people who take the piss and draft one-sided contracts. Judges have many powers, one of which is ruling to disregard unlawful or unfair contract clauses. Shitty LOL clauses are like a red rag to a bull for a judge !
A good commercial lawyer will know how far you can take your LOL clauses without taking the piss.
At the end of the day, if you're selling SaaS, then "we're not liable for anything" is unlikely to cut it in the vast majority of jurisdictions in this world.
So that also answers your second question about why liability and indemnity insurance exists. For the stuff you can't LOL.
You can get: Privacy Policy/T&C/Cookie and Consent Banner as well as a Consent Database tool.
The onboarding starts with a scan of your website, and you are suggested to use specific configurations based on the legislation that will apply to your website. Moreover, iubenda scans regularly your website and checks for non-compliance clues (e.g. a missing service in your privacy policy).
Pricing: there's a free plan for you to start with a basic configuration + pay as you grow.
For UK orientated legalese, https://simply-docs.co.uk/ is quite useful for certain things.
Having said that, the common answer from a lawyer of "it depends" is often true: there are often a lot of nuances that many people don't consider. For example you would think a mutual NDA should be pretty standard, but as it turns out it can be really complex.
If you're not doing well enough to pay the lawyer for custom advice, use the example of people who paid to get it right for them.
Which country's law should apply? Do they get a Dutch or an American lawyer? Is the contract written in Dutch or English (or both)? In case of a legal dispute, which court do they go to? Is the invoice in dollars or euros?
A few year ago international lawyers were charging about 400/hr for contract review services. Actually filing a lawsuit would be prohibitively expensive for a client unless the amounts in question were super-large (probably around 1m or more).
International agreements for small companies are really a show of good faith. In reality it's money-up-front and be prepared to turn down the service on non-payment.
And, there's lots of resources and data, like this: https://seedlegals.com/termometer/
Focus on your project first.
For instance, for NDA, I will see that “in the case of dispute, the legal court will be this city/country.” I just found a template that can be adapted - https://www.onenda.org
I have done this for MSA (Master Service Agreement) and a lot of Statment of Work (SOW) for projects. However, for employment and contracts, I let the lawyers handle it.
Once you are big, growing, and important enough, you are not asking her on HackerNews; you talk to your lawyers. Before that, most agreements are good to stay afloat till the next stage.
E: nevermind this isn't a great answer for your question. Going to leave it up for informational purposes
It covers the basics of GDPR compliance.
I also found Termly helpful for a first Privacy Policy especially through their wizard, which clears up all your GDPR/CCPA matters, but you want a professional to look this over at some point.
Personally I'd be more comfortable using templates on my own for generic business documents, and less comfortable using them for areas of the law that vary greatly by state, like landlord/tenant law, or employment law.