The answer to this could be deceiving. The simple answer is that legal document review is normally charged by the hour of the attorney’s hourly rate. Many businesses view this as a financial challenge, as it can be tempting not pay $175-300 (or upwards) to have an agreement reviewed. Doing this, throws caution to the wind and takes a risk that ‘everything will work out alright’.
The cost to really consider here is the cost of not having documents checked. Every time your business signs a document that hasn’t been reviewed by an attorney, you are risking that unforeseen complications will arise in a deal that pin you to thousands of dollars in liability. Thus, a few hundred dollars spent now can save you thousands of dollars down the road.
Yes, it sounds like tired advice that you have heard hundreds of times. So let’s look at two real world examples of how having a lawyer review a business’s routine agreements would have saved them untold sums later. We will try to balance out the examples with a more modern, high-tech instance, and another more ‘down to earth’ example.
API Agreements
Think of APIs as a way for website, app or software developers to create software that interacts with another piece of software. When you log into one website using your Facebook, Linkedin, or Twitter information that uses API. When you get dozens of invitations to play all of these games on Facebook, the game developer has used facebook’s API. Large web companies who publish APIs require developers to read and agree to API Agreements. Failure to fully understand and abide by these agreements means that you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars developing software, that in one way relies on the API of another company, and you learn 2 months after launch that you were never allowed to use the API in that manner.
One app developer had relied on Flickr’s API to show thumbnails of user submitted photography, only be told to shut down by Flickr. Using the API in that respect, although not illegal, had been disallowed in the API terms, which the developer had agreed to.
Mineral Rights
Both commercial and private landowners have been unpleasantly surprised by mineral right agreements. Oil companies will lease the right to drill or mine from a plot of land for a certain amount of time, but then include a mineral right clause that transfers all of the mineral rights to the oil company. What this means is that the landowner no longer has ownership or control over any ‘minerals’ in the ground, such as coal, oil, or other desirable features. Even if the time runs out to be on the land, the oil company now owns the rights to those minerals.
It’s always best to have any kind of legal agreement reviewed, specifically ‘standard’ forms with any vendor or client that could potentially affect your entire business.