When was the last time that you got excited about things like a privacy policy, terms and conditions, return and refund policy, terms of service or terms of use?
No, you’re right, you never did. These are not very exciting things. The truth is, unless you’re a lawyer, this is pretty dull stuff that no one really wants to deal with. But as digital project managers, we need to look past the boring for a minute and recognize that regardless of whether or not it’s interesting, we need to ensure that everything that we produce is covered from a legal perspective. Or it can end up biting our clients, then our agency, and then ourselves in the butt. Ouch.
Beside the standard terms and condition, terms of use, terms of service, it’s worth thinking about whether or not your clients are suitably covered especially if:
- You collect email addresses
- You use geolocation (GPS)
- You sell products or services
- Visitors can create an account
- Users can publish content
- Users might be tempted to ‘borrow’ your content so need copyright infringements notices
The likelihood is that if the project you’re working on does anything remotely interesting, it’ll need legal agreements. The good news is that there’s a handy online service called Termsfeed that offers a pretty simple freemium fix.
Termsfeed is an online legal agreement generator, which uses a series of simple forms to generate the legal docs you need for your websites, mobile apps, Facebook apps, desktop apps, SaaS apps and in fact everywhere that you need legal agreements. The free service is pretty good, and you simply pay for the additional legal clauses that you want to protect your client (and yourself!). It’s a one-time fee model so when an agreement is updated, you receive a free notification on your email address that you need to update your legalese section.
You can also use TermsFeed to generate the following documents:
Those are all pretty straightforward and TermsFeed does a great job of spitting out legalese without breaking a sweat. It doesn’t quite do it all though – if you’re looking for legals for your competition, sweepstake or prize draw you’re probably best off talking to your friendly lawyer. Making a mistake with those and you could find yourself on super sticky ground.
Get your legal eagle on.