TIL about indemnification clauses after a client got sued in Portland

I mean, I've been running my little agency for about 4 years now and always just signed whatever contract template my buddy gave me. Last month a client in Portland got sued by one of their vendors over some campaign content, and suddenly they were pointing at my contract saying I had to cover their legal fees. That's when I actually read the indemnification section and realized I'd been agreeing to hold them harmless for stuff I had zero control over, like their own product claims. I fixed it going forward, but it cost me $1,800 in a consult to sort out. Has anyone else gotten burned by a boilerplate clause they never read until it was too late?

2 comments

2 Comments

nancy_ross21d ago

Well now, I gotta push back on this one a bit. I run a small crew of plumbers and we've had indemnification clauses in our contracts for years. The way I see it, if you sign something without reading it, that's on you, not on the boilerplate. I've had clients try to pull the same thing on us, but our contracts are written so we only cover damages from our own work, not their faulty piping or whatever they did wrong on their end. You paid $1,800 to learn a lesson most of us learn by just sitting down with a cup of coffee and reading the darn thing before we sign it. Maybe your buddy's template wasn't the problem, maybe it was trusting a lawyer's template without asking a single question about what you were agreeing to.

johnson.jason20d ago

Measured my own contracts against a few sample ones from the trade association before signing anything, and that saved my butt more than once. Cheap insurance compared to what your buddy just paid out.