Skip to content

Hiring Contractors: Employment Agreements

5 pointsc0w2 comments
On HN

I'm a huge fan of outsourcing (elance) and have been working with numerous contractors through them for more than a year. I've spent thousands of dollars and completed dozens of mini projects, and plan on continuing to use their contractors far into the future. However, not once have I had the contractor sign any formal employment agreement/contract. There's a part of me that's saying "c0w, you need to protect yourself. You need contracts!". To those of you who have expertise in this area: what clauses should be in this contract to protect me? In researching this question today I've come up with the following list that seems to be a good starting point:

--Standard employment clauses --Non-disclosure --Non-compete --IP and Trade Secrets --Forum to settle disputes --Non-Disparagement

What am I missing here? Does anyone know of any free sample contracts or templates I could use that are going to protect me and my interests?

I found a site called rocketlawyer.com and they have a number of sample agreements available for free. Has anyone seen these? What's the consensus on them?

https://www.rocketlawyer.com/secure/interview/questions.aspx?document=34044058&utm_source=1024&v=3#q1 https://www.rocketlawyer.com/secure/interview/questions.aspx?document=34044083&utm_source=1024&v=3#q1 https://www.rocketlawyer.com/secure/interview/questions.aspx?document=34044085&utm_source=1024&v=3#q1 https://www.rocketlawyer.com/secure/interview/questions.aspx?document=34044086&utm_source=1024&v=3#q1

Thanks, -c0w

Comments

Many of these things are covered by elance's Independent Contractor Services Agreement, found here: https://www.elance.com/p/legal/Independent-Contractor-Servic...

IANAL but supplemental agreements may not even be necessary.

http://help.elance.com/entries/34758-sample-contract-agreeme...

elance has a sample nda and mnda available. There must be some use cases where supplemental agreements are useful.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.