Not all freelance contract clauses need a lawyer's touch — some you can confidently draft on your own. Want to know how? Read on!
November 28, 2024
A freelance contract is an agreement that stipulates all the necessary conditions from responsibility scope to deadlines and payments. This document protects the rights of both parties and ensures a productive collaboration — as long as you write it the right way.
Read our guide to learn how to write a freelance contract from what should be in it to why you need it in the first place.
Let’s say, you were hired to write a couple of SEO blog articles like this one. The scope of work is quite small, isn’t the chat history enough to establish rates, deadlines, and all the rest? In most cases, not really.
Here’s how signing a freelance contract can benefit you as a freelance worker:
Let’s take a closer look at what to include in the freelance contract, regardless of the industry and other project details.
The project scope establishes the expectations in the freelancer-employer relationships early on. It ensures that you’ll get the expected work completed by certain dates and the freelancer has the right to reject the off-schedule tasks.
Here are the details worth including:
The payment terms you should mention in the contract include:
This clause is related to copyright law and establishes who owns your work once it’s submitted, which is especially relevant for creative specialists like photographers or writers. It answers questions like:
For example, if you’re writing an e-book for a client, this clause specifies whether you’re a ghostwriter or an actual author with your name on the cover. If you’re an author, you’ll be able to print and sell the book — or, if your client does the printing and publishing work themselves, you’re entitled to royalties. Meanwhile, if you’re a ghostwriter, once you finish the book and get paid, it’s no longer yours. The client receives the royalties, you can’t prevent them from printing the book or altering its content if you don’t want to, and so on.
Imagine that you just started working with a new client but then two weeks in, out of the blue and right around your payday, they write you a message: “We cut the budgets, the project is over, none of your finished work or further services are needed, I’m not paying you for anything”. For unlikely events like this one, you need an indemnity clause.
This clause answers the following questions:
If you have an indemnity clause in your contract, you’ll still be entitled to fees for your work even if your client suddenly terminates the project due to budget cuts.
Sometimes nothing goes wrong but you just can’t or don’t want to work with this client anymore, meanwhile, the project is still unfinished. For such cases, including a termination clause will help a lot. Unlike the indemnity clause, it regulates termination not because of emergencies but in more peaceful “I’m tired of their vague comments” kind of conditions.
The termination clause regulates what both you and the employer should do in case of early termination decided mutually or by either of the parties.
Revisions are a normal part of work — however, if you don’t add this clause, you may end up doing dozens of comment iterations for free. If you want to protect yourself, include the clause dedicated to changes and revisions that specifies:
Now that you know what must be included in a freelance contract, let’s check out some tips that will help you write your first-ever freelance contract headache-free.
A freelance contract template will help you conquer the “blank page anxiety”, create the document a lot faster, and ensure that all the necessary clauses are in place. Here are some templates we like:
Payroll services for freelancers offer contract templates too. For example, Solowise has templates for monthly or one-time fixed payments, and also for hourly rates — that’s enough to cover all your freelance needs!
If the contract has a loophole or an unclear definition, it may be used by the client and you won’t get the necessary protection from it since it’s technically your fault. Here’s what to pay attention to:
Some of the clauses we mentioned can be tricky to write by yourself — for example, copyright law can be very convoluted for those who don’t work in the legal niche and don’t have experience in creating contracts.
While the contract itself is relatively easy to write without external help, we suggest asking a lawyer for help with particularly complex clauses.
A freelance contract is not the only document you can make use of. Here are other papers that may help you in your career advancements:
Having a freelance contract on your hands even for the smallest projects is a way to establish clearer expectations in your client-worker relationships and save yourself from future problems, including lawsuit risks and intellectual property theft. We made a list of all the necessary clauses to add to your contract, from project scope to termination conditions. For some of these clauses, like ownership rights, you may need to catch up with a lawyer, while others are pretty easy to write yourself.
The easiest way to write a freelance contract is to use a ready-made template — we included a list of the most reliable freelance contract templates we found online. If it’s your first time writing a contract, don’t be scared, it’s easier than it seems, and we wish you the best of luck!
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