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Old 05-07-2009, 05:05 PM   #5 (permalink)
marcorandazza
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Name: Marc J. Randazza
Last Online: 11-16-2009 08:31 PM
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most of them are the same. Search docstoc.com and you can find what you need. Most likely.
Terrible advice. Some of the worst I've ever seen on this forum, which is itself a swamp of bad advice. A bad advice hailstorm, if you will.

When you put terms of service on your website, you are in effect creating a contract between you and your users. Many are very much alike, and very few wind up being read by anyone except the lawyer who drafted them.

Nevertheless, T&Cs are ticking time bombs. For most websites, they never explode. The site goes on in relative peace, five or six people bother to read the T&Cs, and it never matters. In this case, docstoc or Legal Zoom, or stealing T&Cs from another site works just fine.

But, in the event that there IS a dispute, you just bent yourself over and effed yourself.

Most lawyers won't charge you too much to do these, but a good lawyer will take the time to get to know what goals you have, what your site's users will be like, how litigious of an environment you are in, etc. There are just thousands of variables, but they can usually be narrowed down in about a 45 minute conversation. Then, you might wind up with a set of T&Cs that resemble many others, but if your lawyer doesn't want to get sued for malpractice one day, he's really taken a lot of issues to heart and tried to build in protections for you.

You don't want a "decent contract lawyer." I know plenty of magnificent lawyers who couldn't write T&Cs. You want someone who is web savvy, who does this kind of thing regularly.
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Marc J. Randazza
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