How spending $400 on a contract can save you $10,000
Spending money can be fun – when….it’s on fun things.
But spending money on stuff like legalities is..well..not fun. Not sexy. And downright painful sometimes.
But let me tell you a story, my friend. One that is a common situation I am seeing weekly as y’all roll up to my law firm email with issues.
Instead of choosing:
- peace of mind
- confidence
- doing the right thing
- spending a little cash
Many of you are choosing to simply wait until you have an issue in your business.
Let’s take Eva the Entrepreneur. She came to me at the beginning of the year – FIRED UP to get her business ready to roll. However, Eva didn’t want to spend a few hundred dollars on creating a lawyer-drafted contract for her business.
Eva chose to "wing it" by using free resources she found online, along with her own efforts in Microsoft Word and ChatGPT, to create her own contract.
Eight months later, Eva is back in my inbox because a client of hers has an issue with Eva. Now, mind you, Eva hadn’t really done anything wrong with the client. Provided service, abided by the contract, and all should have been good. Client was not happy and decided to file a lawsuit.
Here’s where the issues really start to ramp up. While you may think that Eva is in the “clear” because she didn’t do anything wrong and had a “contract” – that's not the case. Eva still has to financially pay out to a lawyer and expend financial and emotional resources to prove to the court she did nothing wrong.
Eva starts to see how her “saving” of the few hundred dollars is about to cost her a lot of money. When self-drafting her contract, Eva left out some very key legal miscellany, including attorney fees. Now, even though Eva wins in court, she isn't owed any attorney fees by the client.
Eva has now paid out almost $10,000 to her lawyer and is now paying the lawyer to draft the contract that she should have had done in the first place.
So you see Friends . . . It’s not a matter of IF an issue happens; it’s WHEN.
It’s also not you saying “well I’d never take my client to court” because they might take you.
The biggest takeaway: spend the $400 now to hopefully avoid paying $10,000 or more PLUS $500 for the contract template in the end.