Nondisclosure Agreements, or “Confidential Disclosure Agreements” as they are sometimes called (biotech companies seem to prefer the “CDA” designation), are some of the most common types of business contracts. Although they are often signed with only a cursory review, each one should involve as much review and reflection as any other contract. This is because
This is part two of two posts about how to make your website’s terms of service an enforceable contract. Part 1 was about getting user consent. This one is about making sure that your ToS isn’t an “illusory promise”. What is an “Illusory promise”? In order to form a contract, each side has to promise
Two important principles of contract law for terms of service are “meeting of the minds” and “illusory promise”. Those phrases may sound a bit meaningless, legal, and abstract. However, each one holds a common pitfall that can void an entire website’s terms of service – as if it didn’t exist at all.
California Lawyer magazine did an article on virtual law firms this month, happy to have been one of the attorneys that they did a profile on. Click the image to read this post, and then you can see this link to it.
California already has a law requiring that website operators provide a privacy policy describing what personally identifiable information is collected, how it is shared, and how users can view and update the information, and the effective date.1 Starting at the beginning of 2014, there is now an addition that privacy policy law, which requires that commercial
Anyone providing services on the internet should check their terms of service to ensure that the terms of service aren’t amendable at any time. This is especially true after last year’s court ruling that the Zappos’ user agreement was not valid because it could be changed at any time. This makes the terms of service an
Generally speaking, I don’t really like negotiating with lawyers, mostly because I feel it just isn’t that productive. Business people are much more focused on getting deals done, which is ultimately more rewarding. A good ending to a contract negotiation almost invariably has to include a compromise where both sides have to make tradeoffs between
Fairly often a contractor will create a customized version of something for a client based on a template: a customized version of a software program, a customized presentation or publication. In that situation, the contractor usually wants to be able to use the template again, but the client wants to feel like they own the