7 Signs That There Are Missing Pieces In Your Legal Strategy

Are there holes in the legal protections around your business? Here are 7 signs that you may need to take a closer look at the legal aspects of your business. 

Key Takeaways

• There may be missing pieces in your legal strategy if you:
  • have to deal with clients who ghost or ignore your invoices
  • worry about someone copying your content or stealing your business name
  • see legal language on someone else's website and wonder if you need it too
• Using a contract that accounts for the real problems you face in business, like clients who don't pay or completely ghost you, can drastically change your experience and give you back control over your business
• Taking care of the legal aspects of business empowers you to create a business that supports you, supports your boundaries, and gives you freedom

If you're ready to patch up the holes in your legal strategy and take control of the legal aspects of your business, it's time to join Cover Your Assets. Cover Your Assets gives you the step-by-step training, templates, guides, and coaching you need to get your business legally legit. 

Resources Mentioned

• Join Cover Your Assets by 11:59 PM EDT on October 26 to get $200 off 
• Follow Amy on Instagram @artfulcontracts

Next Steps

Thank you so much for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please reach out and let me know by sending me a DM on Instagram @artfulcontracts

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• Leave a review on Apple Podcasts
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Episode Transcript

When it comes to the legal stuff, sometimes it can be a little bit hard to tell if you have it all covered. Because that's so vague, right? What is the legal stuff anyway? How do you know if you're actually missing something? Today's episode, we're gonna be talking about seven signs, sneaky little things that come up that actually show that you're missing some things in your legal strategy, that there are holes that you need to deal with.

Hey, I'm Amy Nessheim, licensed attorney for online business owners and founder of my own business, Artful Contracts. You're listening to Legal Made Easy, the show that makes the legal aspects of online business easy to understand and implement so you can grow your business with confidence knowing you've got it all covered. Let's dive in.

I think it's super common for business owners to get one of the legal pieces in place and then kind of forget about it. You think of it as a box to check off, and once you have one contract for your one-on-one clients, you check it off and forget about it. Or once you file the paperwork for your LLC, you check it off and forget about it. But it's really a lot more than that.

The legal stuff requires maintenance just like any other part of your business. But we have so many things we have to deal with that it's easy to forget about, right? So in this episode, I wanted to dive into a few signs that the legal stuff actually is causing problems in your business, and there are things that you can do to fix it. That's the good news, right? You can fix it. But here are things if you've been seeing these come up, if you resonate with any of this, then it's time to think about looking at the legal aspects of your business and getting it a little bit more buttoned up. I'm gonna run through these pretty quickly, but then we'll circle back around and talk about what they mean and the steps that you can take to fix them.

The first sign is slack messages or emails coming through at 8 p.m. or on the weekends that you feel like you have to respond to right away. And that's just it's just a matter of boundaries, right? It's just that's showing that your clients don't know what your boundaries are and you don't know how to enforce them, or maybe you aren't willing to enforce them right now, but it's totally fixable.

The next sign is getting ghosted. Getting ghosted. Clients who disappear, they don't answer you, and then they reappear three months later and expect you to restart their project, but now your calendar is full, and how are you gonna fit them in? It's just a mess. Are you even allowed to say no and say, Well, you disappeared, so now I don't have room in my schedule? It's really a pretty terrible situation. Again, it's something that is avoidable.

The next sign is if you see legal language on someone else's website or content and think, wait, do I need that too? If you know what you need, if you know that you have the right things in place, you're not gonna have that thought. You're gonna see that and think, Oh yeah, I have that, or oh, I don't need that because here's why it doesn't apply to me. If you have that thought, then either something's missing, well, something is missing. You're missing the knowledge to decide whether you need it. And even more than that, you might be missing legal language that you actually need.

The next sign is dreading refund requests because you don't know how to avoid them and you're not sure if you can even say no. If you had all of your legal ish together, you would know exactly what your refund policy is, you would know exactly how you need to respond to those requests, and you would be able to hold fast to that. And also you would know that holding fast to that is actually required, it's necessary to protect you. You cannot be wishy-washy if you want your refund policies to even work, and I'll talk about that some other time. But if you're not sure what your refund policy is, that's a problem.

The next sign is hesitating to hit publish on a post or put out a new offer, launch something new because you're afraid someone else will steal it. If you don't know that your content is totally locked down from copycats, that's a big problem. You need to be confident that no one else is gonna be able to steal your stuff, otherwise, you're holding yourself back. And holding yourself back is not the way that you grow your business.

You need to feel confident that you can go all in on a new offer or new content idea without worrying about someone copying it. And that brings us to the next sign: being worried that someone else will copy your business name or your course name, or even worse than that, on the other side of it, you'll find out someone else actually already started using your business name first and they already have the trademark for it, and you have to rebrand, you have to lose all of your brand recognition, change your website URL, change your social handles, all of it gone, and you have to start over. Not fun and honestly expensive, right?

And the last sign that it's time to look at the legal aspects of your business is that nagging feeling that something's about to go wrong and you don't know what it is, you don't know what it will be, and maybe it's even holding you back. The worst part is if you're not going all in on your business because you have this feeling that you're missing something, because you have this feeling that you're exposed, if you're holding back at all because you're not sure if your content is protected, if your branding is protected, if you have the right contracts in place, if you're doing something wrong, if you have the right language on your website.

If you're not going all in on your business for any of those reasons, those are not good reasons. Those are not good reasons to not move forward in your business. You just have to fix them. Just address them and then get back to building your business because they're all totally fixable and you can fix them. You do have the ability to address all of these things and to make all of these things go away. These are all signs that there's a missing piece in your legal strategy, and once you button up your legal strategy, they'll go away and you can deal with it, and life will be so much easier.

So I want to make this a little bit more concrete for you with an example. So let's go back to those ghosts. Let's talk about ghosts. It's almost Halloween, right? We're gonna talk about clients who just disappear, and I want to show you how this is different when you don't have the legal stuff taken care of versus when you do.

So let's say a client ghosts you and you don't have a contract in place with them. They were somebody that you've known for a while, or you met them through mutual friend, you trust them, you decided to just move forward with the project instead of waiting on figuring out a contract. Or maybe you have a contract with them, but it's a template that you found online, and all it says is the price and the dates, and that's about it. It says that you're gonna work for them and they're gonna pay you, and just the basics with that type of contract or with no contract, there's not a whole lot you can do.

If somebody disappears on you, you all you can do really is email them 20 times and they go don't get back to you, and that's it. And then you're also stuck not wanting to take on other clients because you're afraid they're gonna pop back up and expect you to work on their project again. All of that is lost money, lost time, lost opportunity, and a pain in the neck. It's not fun, but there's not a whole lot you can do, right?

If you have a contract that is written to account for ghosts, if it's written by a lawyer who understands that this is a problem that you face and is written to account for that and deal with it ahead of time, it's an entirely different experience. It's a lot better experience.

First of all, the client knows the exact time period that they have to get back to you before they're taken off your calendar. And they know that consequence ahead of time. They know they're gonna be removed from your calendar if they don't get back to you. That's incentive for them to respond on time.

Second, you can collect a deposit up front so you're never out the full amount. And of course, this is a personal business decision. Some people don't like collecting money up front, but even if you're hourly, you can collect a retainer and then bill against it. But it's just a little security blanket that if they do disappear or if they're even just late on an invoice, you're not you're not at zero dollars. You're not out all of that effort for no compensation. You have at least a little bit. And I've talked about this in other episodes. This is something I always recommend.

Next, you can add on late fees to your invoices for those invoices that they aren't responding to. They add on late fees that and those add up over time. And that accounts for the cost of you not having that money in the bank, not being able to collect interest on it or do whatever you need to do with it, and also your time spent chasing down the client. That's time, that time is costing you money, right? So put on late fees because you're losing money chasing down that client.

Next, you can also send the client to collections because you have proof that they agreed to pay. If you don't have a contract that's signed by the client that says the amount and when it's due, you're not gonna be able to send that to collections because collections agencies need proof that the person agreed to pay you before they can collect for you. And I'm not saying you have to send clients to collections. Some people don't want to do that, and that's fine, but this at least gives you the option. You have that ability to make that choice. You have the power to make that choice if that's what you decide to do.

Next, you can terminate the contract. You can have the contract terminate automatically after a certain time period where if they don't get back to you, they're automatically removed to your calendar and the contract is canceled. And then you can fill your calendar with clients who actually pay you and get back to you on time and don't cause you headaches. And this is honestly so key to be able to have a consequence for people who don't get back to you. And that's not necessarily something that's gonna be in some random template written by a blogger that you found online.

And next, the one I've gotten the best feedback about, I think is the most popular, is that you can charge a restart fee. So if that client does come back and you do have room under your calendar and you decide you do want to finish their project, you can charge a restart fee. You can say, Okay, I have this space, you know, we can get started six weeks from now, but you have to pay an extra $500 on top of the project price to account for that time that you spent having to chase them down earlier and the risk that it'll happen again, really. So if they really want you to finish the project, they can pay a little bit extra for that.

The bottom line here is that when you take care of the legal stuff, when you have contracts that actually apply to your business and take into account the situations you face every day, you're in charge, you're making the rules. It empowers you so much to control your experience as the business owner. And this applies to all of those things I listed out earlier.

If you're having trouble with clients emailing you on the weekends and feeling like you have to respond, build it into your contracts, build in your office hours into your contracts, and then you don't have to feel bad about it because they knew ahead of time you weren't going to respond.

If you dread refund requests, same thing. Build a clear refund policy into your contracts or into your terms of purchase for your courses. I mean, even build them into your marketing. It's just a matter of making the decision and then making it clear to the other person. And that's what contracts can help you do. You make the decision, I don't offer refunds, or my window for refunds is seven days, or I offer 50% refunds until X date, X amount of time of working together.

But it's not even just contracts, it's also protecting your content. It's also knowing that your website is totally secure and up to snuff. If you take action and take charge of this stuff and get all the legal stuff in place, you're gonna feel so much more confident in your business. You just feel in charge, you feel empowered to make choices that work for your business and make your life easier.

And that's what I want for you. I want you to know that you can take charge of this stuff. You can protect your business, your passion, and your freedom from all the things that can go wrong in business. Your business can be a source of freedom for you. It doesn't have to be the ball that drags you down, the ball and chain that drags you down with difficult clients, and all of that is avoidable. You just need a system to get all of it in place so that all of it is protected and taken care of.

If that sounds like something you want, if you want to feel empowered to take control of the legal aspects of your business and get rid of all of those nagging worries and the annoying parts of working with clients that we talked about earlier, if you want to feel in control of all that, then I would love to invite you to join Cover Your Assets. Cover Your Assets gives you a step-by-step system that takes the guesswork out of the legal aspects of your business.

No more getting lost in a Google rabbit hole, no more crossing your fingers and hoping for the best, no more chasing clients at ghost, no more dreading refund requests, no more hesitating to hit publish on a post, no more hesitating to launch a new offer. All of that goes away when you just have a system to follow to get the legal stuff covered. And Cover Your Assets gives you the training, templates, and coaching you need to get your business legally legit so you feel in control, you feel empowered.

I'm offering you this invitation right now because until Wednesday this week, October 26th, I'm offering $200 off Cover Your Assets as well as some extra bonuses if you join during this period. And this is my last live promotional period of the year. And just for the sake of transparency, not for the sake of urgency, I have been seriously considering increasing the prices in 2023 just because the program is so value-packed, and we're also doing a complete overhaul of the program content in December and January.

That's all I'm focusing on with my team. So the price is probably gonna go up in 2023, and you get $200 off right now, so really it is the best time to join if you're thinking about it at all. So, just to give you a quick overview of what's included, Cover Your Assets is an online course and it's also a legal resource library, and it includes coaching with me.

So the first aspect is the asset protection method, and that is step-by-step video training that walks you through my signature proprietary method for online business owners to get all the legal stuff in place for your business. This is a three-step method, and the first thing that we do is create the legal structure of your business to make sure that your personal money and your profit is protected, and then once that's done, we focus on establishing boundaries and rules for your client work, and then we back them up with offer-specific contracts, and this takes care of a lot of you know those ghosts and refund issues and all of that.

And then we layer in protections for everything that attracts your clients to you, which includes your marketing, your website, your content, and your branding. So get rid of that nagging voice that says somebody else is gonna copy you. And all of this is laid out in really easy to follow, step-by-step videos with checklists, guides, and templates that go along with each step.

And really, it is designed to be super actionable. I just had a student join a couple weeks ago and she posted in our Facebook group and said that within 24 hours she had gotten her LLC certificate from her state, filed it, got their certificate, she got her EIN, she updated her website policies, added her disclaimer and privacy policy, and she was getting started and filing a trademark all within 24 hours of joining. So that's how step-by-step and actionable it is.

The next piece that is probably my favorite piece is the community and support. There is live coaching and a community. So we have live monthly group coaching calls. We just had one uh the other day. We do them every single month, and those have a I do like a short 10 to 15 minute training on either a topic that's come up a lot in the group of questions that people have had, or something that you know a la changed, or something new is trending in the industry that I want to talk about. And then after that, everyone has a chance to ask questions.

These are on Zoom, so it's always a conversation back and forth, and it's just a lot easier to really go in depth and answer the question fully having a conversation than it is overwritten form. And if you can't attend the calls live, you can also submit a question ahead of time. And I answer the question and you can watch it in the recording. And we have a bank of all the past recordings as well, so you get the benefit of everyone else's questions, and they have listed out in there all the topics from past calls, so you can find you know whatever you're looking for.

And the third piece is the contract template vault, and this is honestly a huge resource. So we have contract templates that go along with the lessons, they're listed out in there with the lessons as relevant to whatever stage you're in, but we also have pulled them out separately into the contract vault so you can always find what you're looking for.

And this has more than 20 plug-and-play legal templates, and all of them have guides that walk you through how to use it, what each paragraph means, so that you can understand it, and then also explain it to your client if they ask you. And this is a huge resource because getting one custom drafted contract from a lawyer is it's gonna cost you what around a thousand dollars, and you get 20 of these templates. And just to list a few that are included because I always get this question.

We have coaching contracts, one-on-one and group, we have uh service provider contracts, consulting contracts, VIP day contracts, contracts for your LLC documents, LLC operating agreement, website policies, terms of purchase for courses, memberships, and digital products. We also have an affiliate agreement and then releases that might be relevant, like a testimonial release, a podcast guest release, a guest speaker release, as well as templates relating to intellectual property like a cease and desist letter, DMCA takedown notice.

It is really comprehensive and gives you everything you need to take action on all of the lessons and make sure you have everything in place. You I don't just tell you you need a contract and then you have to go buy one, you have that included. And all of those pieces, the monthly coaching, the student community, the curriculum, the template library, all of that you get lifetime access. You're not gonna get kicked out after a few months, you're not gonna be kicked off the calls at any time.

All of it, you get lifetime access to it, including updates, which is great timing because, like I said, my entire focus for December and January is just updating this content to make it even more actionable and make sure it includes exactly what you need.

If you want to quiet that voice that says something's about to go wrong, if you want to quiet that voice that says you are missing pieces in your legal strategy, if you want to feel confident that you have it all covered and that your business is legally legit, so that your clients take you seriously too, I would love for you to join us inside cover your assets.

You can join by heading over to artfulcontracts.com slash CYA dash October, and that link will get you that $200 discount, but it expires on Wednesday, October 26th. So this is coming out the 25th. So just make sure you don't delay on that.

And of course, I would love to answer any questions you have about the program to make sure it's a really good fit for you. Feel free to DM me on Instagram and we can talk that over. As always, thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next week.