Using Your Contract or the Client’s Contract

Sometimes you may be “encouraged” by your client to use their standard agreement as opposed to yours.  I want to offer some points to focus in on when trying to make this decision.

First of all, I think its important to avoid jumping to an emotional response.  You may feel offended, or that they are pushing you into a corner.  Take a step back and realize that they are just trying to keep themselves covered.  There may not even be a lot of specific reasons they don’t want to use your contract, but you need to find that out for sure.

So, find out what it is they don’t like about your contract.  This is where you need to get specific and avoid hand-waving as much as possible.  Get them to list out exactly the things they don’t like about to you can be clear on it.  It may end up boiling down to one or two simple items which aren’t a big deal for you.

Some of the things I like to have in my contracts are:

• Credit - ability to post a link in their footer or at least on my portfolio.  Sometimes this isn’t possible when working through agencies
• Penalties for late client deliverables.  I like to have a clause in there to remind them that there are consequences for them not moving things along, don’t usually need to use this, but you never know.
• Browser support - I like to have some limitations here otherwise clients can go a little nuts on having you support all kinds of browsers.

There are tons of other things to consider, this is just a list to get you started.  If you have further, detailed questions, please comment on the post.  The bottom line is how bad do you want the job, and is it paying enough for you to warrant taking a bit of a risk on their contract.

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