What Your Terms and Conditions Tell Your Customers

What businessperson hasn't complained about how lawyers ruin deals? The simple handshake and bar-napkin agreement too often turns into hundreds of pages of fine print, with hourly billing to match. Yet neither party really knows whether it all actually states the deal as each understood it over handshakes. Sometimes the fallout begins because the contracts are unintelligible to the layman ' not good. Other times, the lawyer may have taken far longer than the deal allowed to write a contract, or simply blew the budget ' also not good. Whatever the cause, these problems lead many businesspeople to wonder whether their lawyers are for them, or against them.

39 minute read September 29, 2008 at 10:58 AM
By
Stanley P. Jaskiewicz
What Your Terms and Conditions Tell Your Customers

(Editor's note: One in an occasional series of articles on how knee-jerk boilerplate Web sites terms and conditions can hurt e-commerce enterprises. )

What businessperson hasn't complained about how lawyers ruin deals?

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