ExtraEagle

We are very close to going out of beta with Agree2 and have been working on a new user agreement. While most people don’t really take them serious there is a small yet active group of people who thankfully read through these and take offense. I think this is great and we would like to publicly post the new user agreement for debate before we officially roll it in.

Go to the Public review version of the new Agree2 user agreement to read it and propose any changes you want. You can also add comments to it if you would like.

We will take any comments and changes that people suggest and try to incorporate them over the next week or two.

With whatever experiences we have here, we will probably start a new generic terms of services template that you can use for your own services. Feel free to do so already if you would like to submit your sites terms of services as a new template.

We have looked at several other user agreements on a variety of sites and included some aspects of these, albeit customized to our needs.

Here are some of my notes to various sections:

Whats the Exchange

For a contract/agreement to be legally binding the number one determining factor is that there is an exchange. This does not have to be a monetary exchange and it might be hard to put it in words for a user agreement. We attempt to spell this out in the two sections “What you get?” and “What we require from you?”.

So our part of it is:

We provide you a service where you can create agreements between you and your current or future business partners. We may also provide a series of related services with regards to managing agreements.

This is kind of like a more formalized elevator pitch. However I think it’s a good idea not to limit exactly what kind of services you might want to do in the future.

What we require from you is really our basic ground rules for you.

Active Agreements in Agree2

You will notice we have this clause:

An Active agreement is one that both you and another party has agreed to. It would not be fair to the other party if you could delete agreements made with them. These can not be deleted as they provide documentation for real agreements between you and the other party.

Most user agreements have some clause about closing your account and getting rid of your stuff. However since an active agreement is not just yours, but also the other party we can’t just delete them because one part wants to. This is not really normal so we have to mention this somehow.

Legal Advice

A series of US state laws require us to specifically state that we are not lawyers and that we aren’t offering legal advice. This is kind of annoying for a community site as people like to give advice. For this reason we are following recommended practice and have a big disclaimer about this.

Agree2 is only a platform for creating and negotiating agreements. Our services should not be considered legal advice. You should only use a contract template if you are comfortable that the text makes sense to you. If you have any questions or fears, please leave a comment on the template or ask questions in the forum. If you are still worried please consult a legal professional.

To protect our members from similar liability we also have the following piece:

Unless members in Agree2 specifically identify themselves as lawyers and specifically offer their legal advice, then remember that you need to thoroughly analyze any advice given and perhaps consult with a lawyer if it could affect you seriously economically or otherwise.

You will also notice that wherever you can make comments as a member of Agree2 you will have a little disclaimer next to you, unless you said you are an actual lawyer and you accept that it is legal advice:

Dispute resolution

Disputes should really be handled between us and you. If we can’t do this privately we would like to encourage you to use our support site at Satisfaction. Hopefully all disputes and complaints can be handled there. I think it’s extremely important that we can relate to each other personally and solve the issues, which is pretty much what we say here:

If you have a problem please write me personally at pelle@agree2.com. I doubt that there would ever be anything we couldn’t work out. Let’s leave the lawyers billing people other than us. If you feel it is important to share this dispute publicly with other Agree2 users, please do so on our public support site at Get Satisfaction.

Arbitration

Courts are expensive things for small businesses. They cost a lot and can take a very long time to make a ruling. There are much better alternatives though known as arbitrators. I’ll let Wikipedia describe it Arbitration as they do a way better job than I do. I’m hoping that even cheaper online alternatives will be coming along soon. We will do what we can to integrate with such services (hint, hint).

Anyway we require that disputes that we can’t solve between us go to arbitration. In theory this means that if someone takes us to court anyway the judge will throw it back to arbitration.

If we can’t resolve a dispute between us all disputes arising out of or in connection with the present contract shall be finally settled under the Rules of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce by one or more arbitrators appointed in accordance with the said Rules.

Improperly filed claims

Improperly filed claims would be if someone had a complaint against us and didn’t follow the procedure that we outlined above. Lets say someone skipped personal contact and arbitration and went straight for the courts, this clause which was first invented by EBay is designed to cut frivolous law suits. One of EBay’s lawyers describes it on this Standford Law Podcast about User Agreements

Any claims you bring against Extra Eagle LLC must be done either directly or through arbitration as mentioned above. Should you file a claim contrary to this we may recover attorneys fees of up to $1000, provided we have notified you in writing of such an improperly filed claim and you do not withdraw it promptly.

Please help us help you

Anyway this should give some food for thought. Please read through it and ask us anything about it either here or directly on the Public review version of the new Agree2 user agreement.