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Update: My client's 'simple' contract change turned into a 4-hour legal review
They wanted to add a clause about owning all preliminary sketches, which meant I had to dig through old emails and call my lawyer. Has anyone else had a tiny edit blow up like that?
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nathan_kim5d ago
Can't believe they tried to sneak "and related materials" past you. That one phrase could mean anything from coffee receipts to internal Slack messages. I had a client once ask for "all drafts" and we ended up having to catalog every single version of a design file, including the ones we deleted from the trash. It's wild how three words can turn a two hour job into a two week headache.
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Oh totally. It's the 'innocent' wording that gets you. A client once asked to add 'and related materials' to a deliverables list. That one phrase meant we had to review every single piece of background research and draft notes from the whole project to make sure they weren't suddenly claiming ownership of our internal team's work process. What looked like two words added a full day of back and forth with legal.
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ray_burns1mo ago
Read an article about a contract where "including but not limited to" was slipped into a list. That phrase basically gave the other side permission to ask for anything they could vaguely link to the project. The lawyers had to spend weeks defining the exact limits.
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