By Brian Sherman, Founder, TechSuccess Communications
A good business attorney typically charges anywhere from $100 to more than $1,000 per hour, and while those fees don’t always fit in a solution provider’s budget, they can be good investments. Even organizations with few employees and minimal clients have to create or complete a myriad of documents each year. In addition to maintaining accurate and detailed financial records, federal and state agencies often require businesses to follow a long list of procedures to ensure that they’re in full compliance with a variety of employee and safety rules.
From employee contracts and HR-related documents to non-disclosure and managed services agreements, IT services entrepreneurs have to be careful with the legal language and information included in the forms they use. While solution providers often have a wealth of technological and service expertise, most are quick to acknowledge their limited understanding of business law. Those who recognize this imperfection are typically first to minimize their organizations’ overall legal liabilities by contracting with experienced and reputable lawyers who can help draft and scrutinize the details of all their business documents.
But what about solution providers with limited financial resources or those who would rather be more involved in their organizations’ legal responsibilities. While the Internet hosts many sites catering to small businesses offering everything from standard contracts and non-disclosure forms to tips on organizational law, only CompTIA, a non-profit trade association advancing the global interests of IT professionals and companies, focuses its resources on IT-related law.
To support its solution provider and emerging vendor members, the association developed a comprehensive Legal Resources hub, an online epicenter of official business documents, agreement templates and legal information. This is a one-stop shop for legal tools and informational forums, located inside the CompTIA Member Resource Center. It was created with significant input and support from the association’s advisory council, as well as its members and attorneys who specialize in IT-related law.
The Legal Resource hub covers several areas of IT law:
- Starting Your Business
- Succession Planning
- Maintaining Your Business
- Technology Law
- Legal Templates
- UK Legal Resources
Recognizing that companies’ legal needs vary at different stages of their business life-cycle, CompTIA developed a number of resources to meet a variety of organizational needs. It’s kind of like having your own legal professionals on retainer, available for consultation at any time, but without the associated costs. Actually, CompTIA did this for you—by hiring a team of legal experts to develop the program and to validate all the materials and tools.
The Legal Resource hub is not intended to replace the services of a great lawyer, but it will give solution providers and emerging vendors access to a number of customizable templates. Each can be used to create an individualized document that meets the specific business needs and legal requirements of your organization. The current portfolio of CompTIA Legal Templates includes:
- Buy-Sell Agreements: A covenant between co-owners of a business that determines what happens if a co-owner dies, or is forced to or chooses to leave the business.
- Collection Letters: A series of tiered collection letters allows organizations to escalate payment reminders from warm, firm messages to taking more serious measures.
- Consulting Services: Highly generic professional services agreements can be used in a wide variety of engagements.
- Employment Agreement with Non-disclosure: Outlines employee duties, duration of employment, compensation, confidentiality and the employer’s options to terminate.
- Hardware Maintenance Agreement: For companies that provide hardware maintenance services to small businesses.
- LLC Agreement: Helps protect limited liability statuses, head off financial and management misunderstandings and ensure that the business is governed by the entrepreneur’s rules instead of those designed by the state.
- Managed Services Agreement: For use when a company provides a managed service such as SaaS, cloud computing, data management, website development or hosting or network monitoring.
- Non-Compete and Confidentiality Agreement: Use with key officers or employees who could damage the operation by joining a competitive company.
- Non-Disclosure Agreement: Use when one or both parties plan to exchange information considered to be confidential and when they have not yet signed a broader agreement for products and services that includes a secrecy provision.
- Services Agreement: Use when the company is providing routine services such as maintenance, repair, installation of equipment or software upgrade.
- Software Licensing Agreement: Typically used if the permitted use of the software is limited to the licensee’s internal business use and modification, distribution or sub-licensing of any kind is prohibited.
These templates make it extremely easy to customize each document. You just enter your company information in the fields, hit “submit” and the result is an agreement ready for your customer’s signature
These forms are valuable for any business, vetted by legal and industry professionals to ensure they are enforceable and compliant with regulations faced by IT businesses. Some companies pay thousands to their legal counsel in order to create similar documents, but the CompTIA Legal Templates are completely free to our members.
In addition to the forms, the Legal Resources hub includes a “How To” and “Frequently Asked Questions” sections, written and monitored by attorneys who specialize in IT industry issues. That allows participants to see the issues their peers are interested in and benefit from the ongoing conversations. Rather than investing limited capital to create routine forms and legal documents, solution providers can redirect those funds to new managed services tools or website improvements where they can make more money. That’s just another way CompTIA members get a leg up on their competition.
CompTIA members can access these legal tools for free through the association’s Member Resource Center. Non-members can apply for membership through comptia.org
Brian Sherman is founder of Tech Success Communications, specializing in editorial content and consulting for the IT channel. His previous roles include chief editor at Business Solutions magazine and industry alliances director with Autotask. Contact Brian at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
