After a lot of fruitless searching, I thought I'd ask the YC community for tips on where to find the standard agreements and policies for our web startup. Things like privacy policies, user agreements etc. Of course we can write our own and most likely will do so, but are there any templates out there? Can I just take some good ones and modify them?
If you take a standard setup, say Ubuntu Linux, running Postgres and Ruby on Rails, the ratio of your own lines of code to all the other ones you're utilizing in the system is very small indeed. And you're free to customize all that lower-level stuff if you really need to, under very friendly terms. Unless she means that it's so easy to find and use that it's a silly question?
Software 1, Lawyers 0.
Speaking of which, wasn't YC supposed to open source some of the legal things they have?
If you take all of the case law over the last 300 years, the ratio of your contract to the existing legal infrastructure is very small indeed.
And you're free to customize all that lower-level stuff if you really need to, under very friendly terms (it only gets expensive if you have to defend it in court).
Anybody who is highly specialized, and considers themselves more of an artist than an engineer cringes when you say 'make this super generalized' Try telling a graphic designer to make a template for a few dozen random sites.
I've never found really good templates online. My process was always something along the lines of:
1) Dig into my cache of legal docs I've amassed from other companies over the years (understandably, this probably isn't an option for you).
2) Google around for quasi-competitors, look for the AUP/TOS docs online for inspiration
3) Blend all this into a doc I write sort of from scratch, sort of from copy-paste-tweak
4) Send to corporate counsel for final review/approval.
Because I've created my fair share of legal docs over the years, I don't usually end up spending more the $200-$400 on step #4, but it is VITALLY IMPORTANT. Even when I was sure I had an air-tight doc (and believe me, I'm cynical, crafty and paranoid, makes for a good legal-doc writer), I've been made aware of significant things I've missed or mis-stated. A document that would never hold up in court, or doesn't enforce what you think it does can be worse than no doc at all.
There are places that will charge you money for access to their legal templates, but the couple I've looked at were too boilerplate for my needs.
Yeah, but the laws vary greatly from state to state (in the US), and certainly from country to country.
Some of the things that might be common in the US (specifying state for trials, if any) might not apply to you, and things that are more common/stringent in your area (privacy laws for example) might not be valid or known to a US-based lawyer.
A guy that I had in mind knows a good part of the US law pretty well, and is well versed in MA, CA, NY, and DE (states) legalities, but even he would refer me to someone else if I was dealing with a customer/contract in say Arizona. I don't imagine that he would want to get involved in Swiss law :)
For the most part, just take them from your closest competitor and edit to your satisfaction. We did that in the beginning, and even when we finally got around to paying attorneys, they did more or less the same thing.
Get a good legal dictionary, and any time you think to yourself, "I wonder why they used that particular word there?" LOOK IT UP! You'll be surprised. This is not something to do in the evening over a beer.
A textbook wouldn't be a bad idea, either. Or, at least a trusted online reference.
I think the last time this question was asked the standard answer was "find the site that is most like yours and copy their privacy policy". It's not like these agreements are highly original, proprietary works. Lawyers copy phrasing from each other all the time.
Of course, you get what you pay for. I'd consider paying a lawyer to glance through the results of your scavenging before you make any legal commitments.
I think that's the best approach. Look for similar sites/services or find a few that together do the things you do and copy bits and pieces from their TOS/privacy policy/etc. Depending on what you are doing that is probably good enough until you get some traction. If you take funding down the road I imagine this will all get rewritten for you.
Searching online/google etc. We're bootstrapping so hiring a laywer is not ideal, but we will propbably follow the advice of some others and write it ourselves and then get it reviewed by a lawyer. I cant tell if you were sarcastic about the rest, but we do our design and pr ourselves. Those add value so we do it ourselves, but legal jargon doesnt really add value at this stage, hence my original questions to the YC community. Thanks!
I will probably take agreements and copy them until I can afford to hire a lawyer to draft them for my startup, but it is technically copyright infringement. It's also not the best option for various reasons as others have already pointed out.
"It's like asking 'Where to find standard software and other boring technical stuff for my startup?'"