My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [49]
As you know, I’m not a lawyer. And while I can share the highlights of what I’ve learned over the years about how to draw up and decipher a freelance contract, nothing replaces the counsel of an adept attorney who routinely works with artists, writers, performers, and other freelancers. Likewise, I can’t cover every possible contingency of freelance contracts in one little chapter. So use this chapter and the resources mentioned in it as a starting place, and then get yourself whatever legal help you need, okay?
Your Contract or Mine?
If you’re freelancing for individuals or small organizations that don’t usually outsource, you’ll probably need to provide your own contract. The good news about writing a contract from scratch is that you get to start with a document that’s 100 percent fair to you, the freelancer, which isn’t necessarily what happens when the client initiates the contract. The bad news about writing a contract from scratch is that you have to write a contract from scratch, which, unless you went to law school or have created your own contracts before, can be a lot like trying to write an email in Sanskrit.
Hiring an intellectual property or contracts lawyer to draw up a base contract that you’ll use for all your clients is your best bet. Yes, it may cost several hundred dollars an hour, but it can save you thousands of dollars and countless migraines in the long run. If you do go this route, be sure to get a recommendation from a freelance pal, and be sure to hire someone who has experience drafting freelance contracts. But if shelling out a minimum of $300 an hour sounds like a small fortune, fear not. I’ve listed several affordable options for legal aid in the sidebar on pages 126-127.
You have every reason to be alarmed if a client refuses to sign a contract. If they’re not serious about starting the project or don’t have the money to pay you, they have no business hiring you. And if they try to sell you on some lame excuse about being too busy to sign contracts or some hippie-dippy philosophy about the oppression of legal documents (both of which have happened to me), insist on a contract anyway. Tell them it’s there to protect your relationship in case of disagreement. Offer to convert the doc to email, which, you might remind them, can conveniently be read on their BlackBerry. Or if they’re one of those “allergic to legalese” sorts, use the word “harmony,” and if they’re really crunchy, the words “good energy.” If they still balk, take your chakras and run.
When you freelance for megacorps and smaller firms that routinely outsource work, as I do, the client usually will want to send you their own boilerplate contract. These docs tend to be more formal and verbose, being that they’re written by lawyers hired to protect the company’s hide, sometimes (okay, often) at the expense of your own. Later in this chapter, we’ll talk about some of the clauses to watch out for in these contracts.
Never blindly sign a contract a client sends you without reading it from start to finish. It’s perfectly acceptable to take a few days to mull a contract over and consult with a legal adviser. If any terms you negotiated with your client before the contract arrived are missing, or if anything else raises your hackles (perhaps the client said you’d retain all copyrights but the contract says otherwise, as recently happened to me), now’s the time to speak up. Like project rates, contracts are made to be negotiated.
A client who doesn’t want to be bothered with contract negotiations may protest, “But this is the contract all our freelancers receive.” (Even so, I’ll bet it’s not the one they all sign.) Or they might try, “This is just something Legal requires you to sign. It’s just a formality. I don’t even understand half of it myself.” (I’ll never see the logic in that argument, yet I hear it all the time.) Don’t let any of this intimidate you. As with project