Why hire startup lawyers to draw up your SaaS related documentation?

When you completely focussed on innovation and business development, mundane tasks such as getting legal documentation ready are wholly put on the back burner and often overlooked or worse, copied from a boilerplate template.
Copy and paste is one way used by many to avoid paying exorbitant fees of legal counsel. No doubt these documents (Terms of Use, Cookie Policy, Privacy Policy, etc.) can work with a whole spectrum of generic website/web apps/mobile apps. However, in an increasingly digitized world with a constantly evolving legal system, finding a really good template is hard. And how will you know that it’s good and not outdated?
In this day, software businesses, especially start-ups face a very peculiar set of issues about privacy, data security, and storage which makes hiring professionals with expertise in this area an indispensable course of action.
Some reasons why you absolutely must hire a legal professional for drafting SaaS related legal documentation are
- The terms of the generic drafts may be outdated, and the generic policies that you intend on using may not have updated them.
- Generic drafts may be ambiguous, and inconsistent with your products/service. Most of what you find online describes another’s case entirely and not your own.
- The terms in generic drafts may not correspond to the services offered by your enterprise.
- Payment terms could be vague and could likely leave the client feeling deceived.
- Aspects and legalities of data security, intellectual property, payment provisions, may expose the company to enormous liability.
- You may have launched a new SaaS product, but the terms and conditions of the agreement have failed to evolve.
- The language of these generic drafts is often complicated and vague which makes it difficult to understand.
Any claims you make on your website are binding contracts between you and your users and define your rights and liabilities. It’s understandable to use the templates to get you started. But, we advise you to treat these generic documents to only serve as a stop-gap arrangement till you manage to procure a proper one that is drafted and vetted by professionals who specialize in the field such as Legawise.