The best things in law are [not] free?
Posted by Rachel Flower / September 18th, 2016 / No responsesIt’s Friday night, glass of wine in hand, and you are trawling the internet looking for something free and useful, some ideas to grow and improve your business.
You may be looking for local seminars or networking events, some helpful blogs or business advice, or perhaps some free legal advice on how to decipher that contract you’ve been asked to sign. Another glass of wine and you briefly consider having a conversation with your Other Half, but instead you carry on trawling the net and set your sights on finishing the bottle.
Our desire to find internet freebies can sometimes take over the rational side of our brain (and so does the wine, but let’s not worry about that for now).
There are lots of sites offering fantastic advice, guidance and support networks for businesses – many of which are indeed completely free. I particularly like the Intellectual Property Office website and online tools (see www.gov.uk) – but that’s because I am a self-confessed IP geek. Sad but true.
However, lurking amongst the good stuff is a whole load of irrelevant, incomplete or simply BAD stuff.
Can you always spot it, especially when it comes to online legal stuff?
There has been a recent increase in websites offering ‘free’ legal contracts, sites providing access to documents for a monthly subscription fee and sites which provide ‘teasers’ so that you can access part of a legal agreement, but not all of it for free.
But the question is how can you tell whether it’s any good? Before you start using legal documents in your everyday trading, you need to be confident that they are relevant and favourable to your business and they are enforceable in UK courts should anything go wrong. Otherwise, you might find yourself in a far worse position than if you had no written contract at all!
Without legal training, the only way you can ensure your contract is any good is by asking a qualified lawyer to check it for you, which kind of defeats the object of The Internet of Freebies.
True story. A contact of mine recently showed me a contract he had found online for free. He had been using this contract with his customers for some time. The problem was that the contract was drafted in favour of the customer, not the supplier. This is the equivalent of playing all your Home Fixtures at your opponents’ grounds and giving them a 5-nil head start!
In addition, his contract was confusing, made little sense in places and seemed to have sections taken from American law. In the event of a disagreement, this contract is going to be of very little use. Not only that, but it had virtually no relevance to his business in terms of what they do, how they do it, what payment terms they work to or any other ways of working around service levels or quality.
Without going through the ins-and-outs of what a well-written standard contract SHOULD look like (although you can check out our blog post for some tips on how to do a contract review), I simply want to pop a big red flag in your mind and warn you of the risks when using The Internet of Freebies for legal documentation.
So what’s the alternative, I hear you ask? How can an SME get hold of good quality legal documentation without the luxury of an in-house lawyer or deep pockets to pay for legal fees…?
Well previously, there was no real alternative. That’s why so many small to medium sized businesses take things into their own hands as ‘have-a-go lawyers’, or they trawl for freebies on the internet or completely ignore the issue and hope it all goes away. Which, as we have talked to you about before, is a recipe for disaster and can result in significant costs down the line.
Now there is an alternative and we are called Serenwood. Our mission is to provide jargon-free, affordable legal advice to small businesses at a fraction of the cost of a traditional law firm. We are a team of qualified lawyers and commercial specialists operating on a legal consultancy basis. We are the modern alternative to instructing expensive traditional lawyers, because we offer swift, responsive and bespoke business advice with absolutely no compromise on quality.
My contact did just that and now rests at night knowing that his standard contract of trading is well taken care of. How much did it cost? Less than £500. And included in that cost, he got to join the Serenwood Small Business Hub and receives ongoing commercial advice and access to our monthly training and webinars. With real people who have real qualifications and actual friendly faces.
So stop trawling the Internet of Freebies and come and Talk to Serenwood. Which will leave next Friday night free to share a nice bottle of wine with your Other Half.