Let me ask you this: if you went to the Emergency Room, would you be willing to take faster service, and the possibility of lower priced treatment, in exchange for taking whatever treatment a patient got the day before?
That’s effectively what you’re doing if you use a contract template you found online. There is, of course, the possibility that the prescription for the random prior patient also fits well for your ailment! But the much more likely possibility is that the prescription was tailor-made for another patient who didn’t have the same ailments and injuries that you had.
Do you remember Mad Libs? That funny word game where you’d write down 3 nouns, a couple verbs and adjectives, and then you’d insert them into a pre-written story, and hilarity ensued? That’s essentially a template, when it comes to legal agreements. The problem, obviously, is that legal agreements are just that–they’re legal. They bind you to whatever that template included in it.
To me, templates can be everything from online examples that may have blanks for you to fill in or other party names that you’d need to replace, to cheap non-lawyer legal “service” company documents, such as LegalZoom and AI-drafted word vomit versions.
Unfortunately, in the legal world, we are all (at least somewhat) beautiful unique snowflakes, and need documents written for our blizzard of a situation.
Lawyers are one of the classic professions, and we literally have two thousand year’s worth of rules that keep lawyers from screwing over their clients or doing a bad job. Even if a lawyer does a bad job, they’re still required to hold what’s called “malpractice insurance” that allows you to file a claim and get paid for your troubles if the lawyer still manages to mess up.
To contrast that, all of these other template-fill-in-the-blank companies do not have to follow any of these rules, and certainly don’t have malpractice insurance for all of the times that they make mistakes that harm you. I don’t know if it’s still there, but LegalZoom used to have a big disclaimer on their site that said any document given to you by LegalZoom is not intended for any purpose whatsoever! Take that to the judge!
A contract written by a lawyer gives you exactly what you need, and accounts for your risks, as well. It makes sure that every provision works together with the totality of the document (for example, AI-written contracts often shoot themselves in the foot by negating core provisions with its predictive text). Usually, hiring a legal team to write your contract includes a discussion with the firm to go over all of the elements of your case, what’s important to you, and what you want to avoid. The lawyers will also use their own years of experience to insert terms that are favorable to you and protect you from threats that the lawyer sees, but might be hidden from the general public.
There are a handful of situations in which I’d consider using a template and not calling a lawyer. I need to say here that by reading this, or any of our articles, there is no attorney-client relationship created, and that this does not constitute legal advice.
Situation 1: You’re trying something out and don’t see it as a major enterprise (at least not currently). If you want to try your hand at a business and only plan to do a couple of transactions, the risk of those few transactions going south might be low enough for you to not hire a lawyer to write an agreement. Maybe you just want to see if this business opportunity is something you could do a lot, or if it’s not going to be profitable. There’s always a risk that something goes wrong with the transaction, and then it would, of course, be best to have a contract that was written favorably to you beforehand. That being said, if you want to take the risk on a couple of transactions, I think using a template contract is a reasonable business decision. Then, if you find that the business is worth more of your time and energy, and you are getting more and more customers, it’s probably worth it to hire an attorney.
Situation 2: The business cannot afford to hire a lawyer at this time. If that’s truly the case, then I think some situations warrant the use of a template agreement, just to get you by until you’re profitable. In this situation, though, I think having no formal contract at all is often just as strong as grabbing something online. Usually, you’re quoting rates and jobs/proposals to your customers, and these days, most of that will be done digitally (in writing). If you don’t have a formal agreement, then these negotiations you’re already doing will become the “contract,” if a judge were to review it. Customers can be ruthless, though, and if you give them a template contract, there may be loopholes that the customers can use against you, so you might consider keeping records of your negotiations with your customers rather than pulling something random that could do more harm than good. Again, with this scenario, once your company is profitable again, it makes sense to get a lawyer to write a good contract for you.
If you’re serious about business ownership, if you plan to make a lot of money with this company, and if you see Mad Libs contracts for only their entertainment value, then you should hire an attorney to write your agreements.
Hiring lawyers is actually fun–it means that you get to write the rules to the game however you like! When we were kids playing board games, making up your own rules was frowned upon, but it’s what we do all the time for business owners! Want to make it harder to sue your business? No problem! Want to make it easier for you to walk away from toxic customers? We’ve got you covered! Everything under the sun (that’s not criminal) can easily be put into a commercial contract, so let your imagination run wild!
We’ve been writing contracts and representing business owners since 2013, so we’ve seen just about all there is to see. When we represent our clients, we make sure to take advantage of that experience and put in strong provisions that protect them from problems that happen. We are also easy to get ahold of, we always have a live person here to answer your calls during business hours, and we can usually set up a consultation within one business day. If you’re a serious business owner, we’d love to talk with you! Reach out to our team today!
