Legal Terms for Your Website

Legal Terms for Your Website

Jonathan Mizel says lawyers are one of the necessary partners in an Internet business. Rich Schefren in his Internet Business Manifesto calls legal and compliance matters one of the 12 critical areas of your business.

What do these gurus know that you dont? For starters, that if you want to make money with your online home business, serious money, you need to move beyond the hobby stage and treat it as a business.

Many webmasters, especially those just starting out, know they desperately need good legal assistance in putting together their website. However, with money stretched thin they are afraid to even look at what it will cost to create terms and conditions for their website.

The thousands of dollars dancing in their minds leads them to roll the dice. Typically, this means copying legal terms from another website, and praying that those terms are correct and will work for their website.

After all, if a large company with a bank of lawyers has website legal terms, they should be all right? Shouldnt they?

Nope. Not even close.

These large companies get sued all the time. The online contracts created by their in-house attorneys, who are overworked and have a thousand other issues on their plate - employment issue, financing, stock disclosures, regulatory compliance, can be terrible.

Even worse, many webmasters seek out free legal forms and terms of use for their website. They find free terms and slap them up on their website - without knowing or understanding that the terms mean and their ramifications.

Later, when there is legal trouble they can be horrified at the results.

 AutoWebLaw, is the fastest and easiest way to be legally compliant on your website.  Create custom privacy statements, income disclaimers and terms of service agreements and much more at the click of a mouse.

Legal issues can make or break your business. Not getting basic terms right in contracts can be extremely costly.

When you dont have a basic knowledge of what the legal terms mean, or why you need them, youre playing a form of Russian-roulette. There is one site that provides an analysis of these terms with the Webmasters Legal Guide.

What generally happens is the webmaster finds out the free terms they found or copied had the exact opposite affect of what they wanted. For example, they may end up litigating issues where their customer lives - many thousands of miles away.

What they really wanted was to litigate close to home, and force their customers to travel thousands of miles to decide a claim.

Many times, that is the end of the lawsuit. There is no money to pursue it. The webmaster has lost before it even started - because they needlessly took a shortcut in their website legal terms. So why is it that webmasters, with their life savings at risk, often pay so little attention to legal terms on their website? They spend hours creating a product, then a beautiful website, and a fancy marketing plan. Then, they spend as little money and time as possible assessing their business from a legal perspective, and preparing legal terms for their online business.

It makes no sense or cents.

If you do not have legal website terms protecting you and your business, get some, and make sure they are from an attorney or qualified resource.

 Brian Kindsvater is a California attorney and the author of the top selling ebook Webmasters Legal Guide - which clearly explains what legal terms are needed for your website, and most importantly why.

Brian Kindsvater is a California attorney and the author of the top selling ebook Webmasters Legal Guide - which clearly explains what legal terms are needed for your website, and most importantly why.