Had a chat with my neighbor who's a lawyer that changed how I write scope sections

My neighbor Jeff is a contract lawyer and I was grilling burgers last Saturday when he asked to see one of my freelance contracts. He read the scope part and just laughed. Said my description of "design work" was so vague a judge could fill a pool with the loopholes. He pointed out three sentences where a client could claim something was out of scope just by saying they didn't remember agreeing to it. Now I rewrite every scope paragraph to list exact deliverables like "3 homepage mockups with 2 revision rounds max" and I haven't had a single dispute since. Anyone else had a non-freelancer friend or relative spot something obvious in your contracts?

3 comments

3 Comments

caseywalker1d ago

The flip side of this that nobody talks about is how specific scopes can bite you too. I had a designer friend who listed "2 rounds of revision" in her contract, finished the second round, and the client came back with a third round of notes claiming they were "clarifications" not revisions. She held her ground and lost the client, but more importantly she lost a bunch of future referrals from that person's network. Now she writes in a buffer clause about "reasonable changes to existing approved work" just so she doesn't have to be the bad guy all the time. It's almost like you have to write these things to protect both sides from each other, not just yourself.

brooke_murray22h ago

Wait, are we really acting like one bad referral chain is the end of the world? Caseywalker's friend probably dodged a bullet - if that client couldn't tell the difference between "clarifications" and a third round of real edits, they were gonna be a nightmare on the next project anyway. I've been burned way more by fuzzy contracts than by being too specific. That buffer clause sounds like a new loophole waiting to happen, honestly. You write "reasonable changes" and you might as well hand the keys to the client.

martinez.paul12h ago

Man, I had a buddy who spelled out "two revision rounds" and the client kept sending back "typo fixes" that were actually full paragraph rewrites. He ended up doing five rounds before he finally caught on.