Over time, as I got more engaged in the Finnish freelancing community, I realized that many people struggled with the same issue. After discussing this in our freelancing co-op Ohjelmistofriikit, we decided to invest both time and money into solving this problem. We decided right from the start that we were gonna open source everything and give it out for free.
We first developed a traditional document template in collaboration with a law firm. After that we developed a web generator that makes it easy to fill out the template. The user flow of the generator is designed to eliminate boilerplate-type work (such as hiding sections instead of showing "skip this section if condition X does not apply to you") and also to reduce mistakes users might make when editing a traditional document template (such as copypasting something incorrectly).
Although the legalese is designed for the Finnish jurisdiction, the contract template can be useful as an example for similar work in other jurisdictions.
Go ahead and draft a contract right there in your browser!
I've also found it's pedagogically helpful to have two versions of each contract, a consultant-favored and consultee-favored. This way you can understand how each clause may be tweaked to benefit each party. For example, this book does this (US-based): https://www.amazon.com/Consultant-Independent-Contractor-Agr...
Or, even better, instead of having only two versions of a contract, we can offer this choice on individual clauses within the contract. On some clauses the parties may choose to go with consultant-favored option whereas on some other clauses the parties may choose to go with client-favored option. This is what we ended up doing with the generator :)
I started reading the contract they sent me, and it didn't make sense. It stipulated that I carry liability insurance, which doesn't make any sense when writing software.
I decided to Google a phrase or two out of the contract, and I found nolo's ("No Lawyer's") template contract for hiring a contractor to do work on a home.
I decided the guy wasn't savvy enough to work for and thus I walked away.
Deleted Comment
As an European I ain't bothering suing you in the US over few thousands of $, a lawyer would be more expensive than letting it go.
On the other hand I take my obligations quite seriously.
Have to say, never had one bad experience in my life, worst that happened was getting paid 10/14 days late.
Getting customers that mean business is the hardest part, lunatics think I am applying for a full time position and making me go through 2/3 rounds of interviews and asking me to implement Levehnstein distance or something to do QA and write E2Es at their scaleup are out of their mind.
One example: does the counterparty start with a one-day NDA or a mutual NDA template.
These are not just for consulting, but covers also other IT related topics (depending of type of deal you decide which parts to include).
[1] https://it-ehdot.fi/briefly-in-english/
1) See how many steps there is in total.
2) Some "info" about the boxes - for example, what does "reference rights" mean?
3) Downloadable examples to see what is being generated in the first place.
4) Dispute resolution should also have a "Other" option that allows the user to manually input a custom value.
Otherwise it seems a like a fantastic thing! And thanks for making it free!
3) Downloadable examples to see what is being generated: sample output links are already on the landing page. You can ctrl+f to "The PDF might look like this."
2) You can look at sample output to get more information about what the boxes mean. We made a design choice to avoid legalese text in the UI. Reference rights mean: The Supplier has the right to reference The Client in marketing as The Supplier’s customer.
4) Possible choices for dispute resolution are courts in Finland and arbitration. Before the summer we discussed internally whether we should include arbitration as a choice. We ended up deciding that we won't allow our users to choose arbitration. Since there are no further valid options for dispute resolution, we won't add an "other" option.
Thank you for the feedback!
2) You can tell you worked for ClientCompany on SpecificProjec
> This contract was created using ohjelmistofriikit.fi contract template.
Very good. Consider having some kind of version information, such as a date (more human readable) git commit id (unambiguous), or just 1.0.0.
Assuming your contract becomes popular, it's easy to just see that "oh, this is the ohjelmistofriikit contract version 2" instead of reading every word.