A client told me "this sounds like boilerplate" and I had to rethink our contracts

I was pitching a retainer agreement to a small biz owner in Portland last month and she said my liability clause read like every other agency's cut-and-paste job. She wanted language that actually explained why we had those protections instead of hiding them in legalese. Has anyone else had clients push back on standard contract terms like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

ray_miller4115d ago

@rubyk86 that plain english section idea is gold because it turns your contract from a wall of scary words into something that actually builds trust instead of making clients feel like they need a lawyer to read it.

rubyk8615d ago

My own contracts looked like they were copy-pasted from a template I found in 2015, so I feel this hard. I rewrote my entire retainer agreement after a client circled the indemnity clause and asked 'so if I break this, you can take my house?' which sent me into a spiral. Now I have a plain English section before the legalese that explains things like 'this part is here because we once had a client who shared our login with their entire marketing department'. It's not pretty or professional looking but clients actually read it now, which is both better and scarier.

lauras8315d ago

Hang on, I gotta gently push back on something. You said it's "not pretty or professional looking" but honestly I think that might be backwards. Clients are so used to seeing those super polished templated contracts that look exactly the same as everyone elses. When something actually looks a little rough or has plain explanations it reads as honest and human. Like you actually took time to think about them instead of just pasting in a wall of text. I'd rather have a contract that looks like a real person wrote it than one that screams "lawyer copy pasted this from 2008 and never looked back". Its not unprofessional to be clear, its actually way more professional because it shows you respect their time and their ability to understand what they're signing.