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Ask HN: Where can I find good legal documents?
319 points by yonom 9 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 79 comments
Whenever I start a new (side) project, getting the website set up with T&C, Privacy Policy, etc. is a pain point.

Here are a couple sources I've found:

- Common Paper (NDA, TOS, SLA, DPA, CSA, ...)

- YC Safe (Fundraising)

- Clerky (Fundraising, Employment, ...)

Looking for more resources like these.




For those not familiar: Common Paper https://commonpaper.com/standards/ seems to have the best free standard docs.

Here's the post where they describe it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36043944

here's another one: https://www.avodocs.com/


Thanks for the mention and kind words! I’m one of the cofounders of Common Paper, happy to answer any questions.

Our docs are free, released under creative comments, have been downloaded more than 17,000 times and used to close millions of dollars worth of deals.

If you’re not sure what kind of contract you need, this blog post might help:

https://commonpaper.com/blog/saas-contracts/


Are there any templates for businesses that are engaged in manufacturing bespoke electrical components for their B2B customers?


We're focused on B2B software companies, so we don't have any templates for that use case. I'm not aware of publicly available templates serving bespoke manufacturers, but I'd love to learn about them if you find any


> We're focused on B2B software companies

Out of interest, is that a permanent(ish) decision, or are you intending to use that as a spring board, eventually aiming for industry-agnostic?

Thanks


In the long term, we'll expand out from that. It will be industry by industry, since the contracts you need for eg manufacturing or catering are going to be very different than software.

Some of our agreements, like the NDA, are already used in other industries since they are more industry agnostic


Do you know of any similar resources in the Family Law area? (not sure how to specifically word my question, but helping someone with some custody related issues - and wondering if there is some resource I could be aware of to help?)

Else, was going to turn to the GPTs and see what they may muster, but any even general direction pointers would be appreciated?


IANAL, but there are some things where you should really get expert advice. Child custody is one of them.

I think with legal docs generally, you have to decide what the stakes are and act accordingly. In general, keep in mind that most lawyers won't take a case unless there's someone with deep pockets to sue. So for that $20k loan you give to a friend, a boilerplate template is fine; if they don't want to pay you back, a lawsuit is gonna cost you more than the loan anyway. You've got a new startup for website monitoring with 20 customers? Worry about growing your userbase, not the remote chance that you get sued and something in the boilerplate docs you used wasn't worded properly (of course, once you raise significant money or have significant revenue, those legal docs become much more important, and also this doesn't apply if you are working on something with significant risk, such as a medical device).

But child custody isn't one of those things. It is high stakes, the chances that your counterparty will sue you are very high, and a bad outcome might be one of the worst things that can happen to you. Personally, the possibility of losing custody of my children would be much more worrying to me than any financial lawsuit.


I have a friend in a messy divorce. With custody, all rational thought has gone out the window. Cost of lawyers? Doesn’t matter, sue! Need to comply or get fined? Don’t care. Court ordered therapy? Don’t feel like it.

The pockets that fund this behavior will be empty at some point. But until then, primal irrational impulses are running the show.

In a case like that, the difference between the right legal docs and the mostly right docs would be huge.


Legal divorce proceedings are like wedding planning, except every professional around you instead has a financial incentive to make you as angry and mean as possible, because it means more billable hours.


I have seen hundreds of thousands of dollars incinerated on legal fees due to this. Very accurate!


To be honest; We need a "divorce/came-into-money-IPO/WTF do when tech couples split?" TECH DOCUMENTS (For all parties - but specifically their kids) thingy...


Prenup for assets, judges in family court for kids. Why no docs for custody and kids in general? Because a disinterested human needs to make the decisions at the time the exception occurs.

(have volunteered some time as a guardian ad litem, and most in my circle are divorced, from the homeless to a billionaire)


I was more looking for properly formatting a document for filings was all?

Maybe thats a poor example - but forms help thats not spammy, but also not "starting a business related"

Legal resources online all seem so "Better Call Saul" quality. Like going to a used car lot.


Unfortunately, I don't know of any resource besides an attorney that would help with a custody issue. I'm sure that's rough, and I hope things turn out as well as possible for your friend and their family. A few other resources that are outside the commercial realm are:

https://helloprenup.com/ https://hellodivorce.com/ https://www.getdynasty.com/ https://trustandwill.com/

I haven't personally used those services, but the founders are great


> was going to turn to the GPTs

this seems ripe for disaster. hopefully, you weren't serious. as with all things, I'd really hope anything in the realm of legal documents from GPT would be then consulted with an actual lawyer


Sorry - I am looking for properly formatting, the fact that their case is custody was useless info I guess...

I just want to ensure that documents are formatted properly... that was all.


just to pile on, but forgoing a lawyer in a custody case is the definition of not smart. just don't do it.


In a contentious custody case, this is very true. If the parents are splitting up and agree on a plan that they both like, the lawyer becomes far less necessary. Although then the lawyer is very cheap and probably still worth it.


I've had luck with Nolo legal documents, for things like a simple will when I was young and my estate was simple.

https://www.nolo.com/


I'm about 99% sure calling it "creative comments" is just a brain slip (or TTS error) and you meant "creative commons," but because that really would be a creative change, and the 1% chance that I'm wrong has a really big risk when dealing with a company familiar with legal documents, I just want to confirm?


Thanks for checking, and unfortunately it seems like my original comment is no longer editable. I'd like to blame autocorrect, but I think I was actually typing before I had my coffee this morning

All of our standard agreements are released under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. More details on that license here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/


I've saved so much time using CommonPaper at my company. Many agreements are still negotiated, but even the cover-page concept makes it that much easier to understand what is being argued.


Thank you!


I agree with what lots have written here. The biglaw firms that have notable tech practices are good and have resources for brand new startups. For example, CooleyGo or Latham Drive or Wilson Sonsini's term sheet generator. For PPs and Terms, I tend to start with competitor services and see how theirs are written/compare clauses. The more established the company, the more likely it is that you can rely on them to have had their own docs vetted by decent attorneys, though of course quality isn't guaranteed. I have used TermsFeed as a starting point before.

For employment matters, SHRM's "Tools and Samples" resources are good.

Thompson Reuters has a free 7 day trial of their "Practical Law" product, though I haven't explored it personally.

Techcontracts.com is a good resource.

ETA: these are all starting points - the docs always have to be reviewed and modified for your particular circumstances. But they’re reasonable for the first draft.

(I do outside general counsel work for small startups)

Good luck!


Here are some early Startup related ideas, links, tools that I gather to not repeat my answers to founders asking for them. For Legals, please go to https://docs.inboxstartup.com/operate/legal

Quite a lot of the founders from the mentioned links/startup/companies are friends or part of a cohort. This is a like an Inbox and I might need to keep cleaning them up.


Kyle Mitchell is a lawyer that can program, and has done a ton of open source work on legal docs: https://projects.kemitchell.com/

For example, here are his employment/hiring docs: https://squareoneforms.com/


There are some templates that might be helpful here: https://www.techcontracts.com/contracts

However, if you want to start something big, it's better to find a lawyer to draft your legal documents, especially the ones you publish online (from a lawyer).


> Where can I find good legal documents?

A lawyer. A lawyer. A lawyer. A lawyer. END OF STORY.

And I'm saying that from a perspective of someone who used to use free/cheap template docs a long time ago.

The hard reality is that free/cheap ready-made docs are highly unlikely to be suitable for your business context for one or more of the following reasons:

          - Jurisdiction of you or your clients
          - Insurance requirements from your insurer or your clients insurer
          - Clauses not there that should be there
          - Clauses there that are not good enough
          - Clauses there that should not be there
Free/cheap docs are all fun and games until the shit hits the fan and you need to rely on them. Its at that point you'll find yourself wishing you ponied up for a lawyer. Trust me, been there, done that, got the postcard, never again.

Paying a lawyer to help you with legal documents is a necessary business expense. Just like paying taxes, either you pay upfront or you pay the penalty later.


This isn't necessarily true.

I've spent six figures on legal fees easily, and I also use templates and off the shelf stuff all the time. Clerky is a good resource and is fine for most core stuff.

You just can't pay lawyers every time you do everything, it's a waste of resources for small simple businesses that may never go anywhere. And the other issues is EVEN IF YOU DO that doesn't guarantee anything, most lawyers are just using THEIR templates anyways and charging more. If you don't know what to ask for you and don't yet understand the business dynamics you really get almost no value add from having an actual lawyer.

I'm currently paying a law firm about $20k to rewrite a bunch of docs that I used templates for about 5 years ago. I consider that a success, the business now has millions in revenue and can afford it and it's fine. That's a pretty normal sequence of events in business.


> it's a waste of resources for small simple businesses that may never go anywhere.

As per my original post. That statement is one made from the comfortable armchair of somebody who has not had to litigate off the back of a free/cheap ready-made contract.

What is a waste of resources is paying a lawyer to try to get you off the hook for something that could have reasonably been in the contract in the first place had you had it drafted for your specific business context rather than relying on some shit internet template.

> most lawyers are just using THEIR templates anyways and charging more.

This is bullshit and you know it.

Yes, lawyers use base templates, but that's because there are some clauses that will always need to be there no matter what. However the devil is in the details and the lawyers also sit down with you to understand your business context and those templates get edited, sometimes heavily edited depending on the business context.

The point is that you are paying the lawyer for their experience. They know what should be kept in the template. They know what should be removed from the template. They know what should be added to the template AND they know how to add stuff to the templates in a legally correct manner.

You claim to have spent time with lawyers drafting legal documents, ergo you should know that and not spread FUD.


Are you a lawyer? Only lawyers with something to sell or people working entirely in hypotheticals talk like this.

People who have actually hired lawyers and litigated things know what a shit show it all is.

> As per my original post. That statement is one made from the comfortable armchair of somebody who has not had to litigate off the back of a free/cheap ready-made contract.

I've done exactly that. You can create a contract by two people writing down what they agree on in bullet points and have it be binding and litigate it if you want instead too. It's actually pretty normal. Legal docs aren't magic, they're words that represent agreement between humans, and in litigation usually what's going on is a bunch of humans trying to figure out which narrative best represents the actual underlying agreement between the people in question.

> What is a waste of resources is paying a lawyer to try to get you off the hook for something that could have reasonably been in the contract in the first place had you had it drafted for your specific business context rather than relying on some shit internet template.

Even more of a waste of resources is paying a lawyer to sort of kind of pay attention for a few minutes to your requests before assuming you're like some other situation he's seen and giving you that person's template and charging you $3,500. Which is generally what happens to people if they don't know what they're doing.

Or, alternately, paying $25,000 for a real firm with domain expertise who do actually listen to you and successfully craft a great customized document that does in fact slightly improve on the template you would have used. And then none of those things ever actually happen and it doesn't end up mattering anyways.

> Yes, lawyers use base templates, but that's because there are some clauses that will always need to be there no matter what. However the devil is in the details and the lawyers also sit down with you to understand your business context and those templates get edited, sometimes heavily edited depending on the business context.

> The point is that you are paying the lawyer for their experience. They know what should be kept in the template. They know what should be removed from the template. They know what should be added to the template AND they know how to add stuff to the templates in a legally correct manner.

Yeah sure, that's possible. But in order to get good legal work you have to know what to ask for, and you have to be working with the right lawyer.

Most people aren't going to be good at either of those two things, and working from templates is quite likely to lead to better outcomes for those people at a tiny fraction of the cost.


You make great points. One of my law professors always said, "clear communication makes for long relationships." He was a small town lawyer that explained our job included: - making sure both parties understood exactly what the contract meant (legally, businesswise, etc.), and - asking the parties to talk through any issues (business, legal, etc.) that could arise and how they might want to handle the issue.

Different parties cover these two points in all sorts of ways. You're right, it doesn't necessarily make sense to hire an attorney when the parties are on equal footing, experienced, clearly understand each other's duties, and don't really disagree on how to proceed should an issue arise.

It's kind of like hiring a designer/firm for a website. Some will overcharge for a Wordpress template or they might charge big fees to give you a robust solution that is extreme overkill for your application. But, if you find the right designer/attorney, they will work with you to meet your financial and business needs. That seems to be the hardest part.


Exactly. These free legal documents are great—until you have to litigate one.


Extending this thread because it costs maybe max 2 hours of consult time with a lawyer to put one together. $500 today can save you from a $5M lawsuit tomorrow.

And even then you should still read it and become intimately knowledgeable with each provision


> $500 today can save you from a $5M lawsuit tomorrow.

Yup. I've had one or two clients make all sorts of threats at me, accusing me of stuff when it was caused by their inactions.

But then funnily enough, when they finally get round to paying their lawyers to look at the contract they signed, they find they don't have a leg to stand on or at least they'll struggle to make a worthwhile case.


My liability insurance asks who drafts the legal agreements in engagements and, if it is my company, they explicitly ask if a lawyer is involved.


> My liability insurance asks who drafts the legal agreements in engagements and, if it is my company, they explicitly ask if a lawyer is involved.

Yup.

This is precisely one of the points I was getting at.

If your business has liability insurance and ESPECIALLY if your business has professional indemnity insurance, then really you have zero option but to pay a lawyer to draft a contract.

Read the proposal form you signed. Read the small print of the insurance. And most important of all, remember how insurance works, the insurance company expects you to have made a reasonable effort to mitigate your losses.

By being a cheapskate and using a free/cheap ready-made template from the internet, the insurance company would be well within their rights to argue that you had not made a reasonable effort to mitigate your losses and the loss adjusters will adjust your payout downwards accordingly.


Not sure I understand the context of this sub-thread?

What kind of lawsuits (and need for liability insurance) should be expected for a software SaaS with a TOS that basically says "we're not liable for anything...". As every software terms state (grumble).

From the sound of it, seems you two are talking about providing something moderately mission critical.


> with a TOS that basically says "we're not liable for anything...".

And therein lies the problem.

You may think that stating "we're not liable for anything" is an easy get out of jail free card.

The reality is that drafting LOL (Limitation Of Liability) clauses is an artform that evolves constantly inline with emerging case-law in your jurisdiction.

You see, there's this little problem of someone called a judge.

Judges tend not to like people who take the piss and draft one-sided contracts. Judges have many powers, one of which is ruling to disregard unlawful or unfair contract clauses. Shitty LOL clauses are like a red rag to a bull for a judge !

A good commercial lawyer will know how far you can take your LOL clauses without taking the piss.

At the end of the day, if you're selling SaaS, then "we're not liable for anything" is unlikely to cut it in the vast majority of jurisdictions in this world.

So that also answers your second question about why liability and indemnity insurance exists. For the stuff you can't LOL.


Ok, thanks. I agree this is a concern that exists and is a worry for some. But I'm looking for concrete examples of what kinds of events and businesses are most at risk.


The advice is golden, however the hourly rate is about ten years old. Expect to pay a minimum of $400 hourly rate. (Free initial telephone consults are still easy to find and I have cumulatively learned a lot stacking multiple free consults together)


I work for iubenda (https://www.iubenda.com/) and it's a precious tool for website compliance. I was a user myself before joining the team.

You can get: Privacy Policy/T&C/Cookie and Consent Banner as well as a Consent Database tool.

The onboarding starts with a scan of your website, and you are suggested to use specific configurations based on the legislation that will apply to your website. Moreover, iubenda scans regularly your website and checks for non-compliance clues (e.g. a missing service in your privacy policy).

Pricing: there's a free plan for you to start with a basic configuration + pay as you grow.


I had a similar problem and found that the ones I made from free sites or using different terminology are often wrong or say the wrong things that don't fit our service. In the end, we outsourced it to a professional legal service. (The ones that make them for free or for a fraction of the cost are often templated and fill-in-the-blank, which is attractive, but has obvious limitations).


https://www.termsfeed.com/ is handy for TOS, T&C, Privacy Policies etc.

For UK orientated legalese, https://simply-docs.co.uk/ is quite useful for certain things.


You could try Termly: https://termly.io/


The world would be a better place if we could all just be happy with standardized legal agreements: the pros/cons are easier to know ahead of time for both parties, you don't need much legal advice around them, and there isn't a lot of legal busy work that nobody really wants to do (even lawyers).

Having said that, the common answer from a lawyer of "it depends" is often true: there are often a lot of nuances that many people don't consider. For example you would think a mutual NDA should be pretty standard, but as it turns out it can be really complex.


Public companies have to file a lot of documents with the SEC, and often contracts get disclosed. Paid services such as Bloomberg Law are essentially glorified search engines on this free public dataset.


Surprised I had to scroll this far down to find this. Options? Employment contracts? The SEC database is golden.

If you're not doing well enough to pay the lawyer for custom advice, use the example of people who paid to get it right for them.


Nobody suggesting NoLo?

https://store.nolo.com/products/online-legal-forms


Here's something related that I've been wondering about: what if the client is from another country? Let's say the company is from the Netherlands and they are selling a service to another company in the US.

Which country's law should apply? Do they get a Dutch or an American lawyer? Is the contract written in Dutch or English (or both)? In case of a legal dispute, which court do they go to? Is the invoice in dollars or euros?


Having worked at a few places with international clients, I can tell you that nobody in their right mind would sue someone located overseas if they can help it.

A few year ago international lawyers were charging about 400/hr for contract review services. Actually filing a lawsuit would be prohibitively expensive for a client unless the amounts in question were super-large (probably around 1m or more).

International agreements for small companies are really a show of good faith. In reality it's money-up-front and be prepared to turn down the service on non-payment.


CooleyGo is great: https://www.cooleygo.com/documents/


https://www.cooleygo.com/documents/


If you're in the UK, https://seedlegals.com is the place for all of this.

And, there's lots of resources and data, like this: https://seedlegals.com/termometer/


Why does a side project need a bunch of legal documentation? Actual harm must be shown before you'll find yourself in any trouble. Having a shiny cookie policy isn't really going to help you.

Focus on your project first.


Basecamp has their policies on Github under a "CC BY 4.0 DEED" license, though it looks like they've archived the repo: https://github.com/basecamp/policies


Great question! I updated my privacy policy last year and wanted to leverage more "open" policies, but found that world to be lack and instead pooled a bunch I appreciated and asked my laywer to emulate. Wasnt the cheapest approach, but Im happy-


Rocket Lawyer (www.rocketlawyer.com) is a paid service but has a really good library of legal documents you can create online, plus access to attorneys to help review your docs or answer questions.


Legal systems are code execution for people who can’t code. Use accordingly.


Do any of these resources target multiple different countries? The requirements for these kinds of documents tend to vary wildly, even between countries with similar legal traditions in the Anglosphere.


I had edited/signed a lot of documents for my service company, other companies I consulted with, and quite a few of the Startups I was part of. The idea is to keep the generic ones as possible and then look for the part particular to the country’s legalities.

For instance, for NDA, I will see that “in the case of dispute, the legal court will be this city/country.” I just found a template that can be adapted - https://www.onenda.org

I have done this for MSA (Master Service Agreement) and a lot of Statment of Work (SOW) for projects. However, for employment and contracts, I let the lawyers handle it.

Once you are big, growing, and important enough, you are not asking her on HackerNews; you talk to your lawyers. Before that, most agreements are good to stay afloat till the next stage.


Westlaw is the industry standard but it's not free iirc.

E: nevermind this isn't a great answer for your question. Going to leave it up for informational purposes


Wilmerhale has a document generator for a lot of what you need. No need to log in, create an account etc. I use these.


I couldn’t find any generator on their site


Try this: https://launch.wilmerhale.com/#bannerExplore and scroll down to a bubble called "Document generator". Or just search for "launchpad" on their site.


thank you!


You can also use one of those lawyer services you pay for monthly, inuse mine to review things like this occasionally.


You mean templates ...


In terms of a privacy policy, the UK ICO has a good starting point for UK based organisations: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/advice-for-small-organi...

It covers the basics of GDPR compliance.


A lawyer. I would try contacting a local startup incubator to see if they have any recommendations before you start googling or looking up Avvo.

I also found Termly helpful for a first Privacy Policy especially through their wizard, which clears up all your GDPR/CCPA matters, but you want a professional to look this over at some point.


It’s critical to only hire a lawyer who has exact and recent experience with what you need in tech/startups, or you’re paying to educate them and things might not be as good as they could be because they are new to it.


Free legal documents are worth what you pay for them.


This actually depends. If you need something specific, tailored to your needs and operational niche, then obviously you can not forego a visit to a lawyer. However, for some documents, a reputable template is more than enough. (As even lawyers rarely draft "bespoke" documents for every client and happen to use a templated text more often than not).


Even when I've ended up needing a lawyer (albeit for private legal transactions like estate planning) going through the process of finding a template, customizing it to what I wanted, and thinking through as much as I could was invaluable. The subject matter can be complex and lawyers are expensive, paid by time, and (in my experience) have a habit of bulldozing through explanations to clients; the more prep you've done ahead of time the more value you can get out of your lawyer time (e.g. by knowing what questions to ask and having a clear picture of the issues at hand).


It is definitely possible. But it is not always trivial to know which solution you need without the advice of a lawyer. Lawyers use templates a lot, but they also know which templates work in which scenarios and in which jurisdictions.

Personally I'd be more comfortable using templates on my own for generic business documents, and less comfortable using them for areas of the law that vary greatly by state, like landlord/tenant law, or employment law.


You have a point, but it's important to note that the template needs to be local to you. Laws aren't global, what is an appropriate T&C for a service hosted in USA won't be okay for a service hosted in UK or Singapore, and even within USA differences in state laws sometimes are critical, so you need to ensure that you're not getting a template aimed at somewhere else.


Illinois (biometric laws) come to mind


ChatGPT can produce a pretty good ToS/privacy policy in a pinch.




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