friendly legal

I've just finished reading through the first draft of the Terms and Conditions and Contract for Newspaper Club. Our lawyer sent them over this afternoon. To me, with no legal training or experience whatsoever, It all seems comprehensive, sensible and necessary, but it's in no way friendly or welcoming to read. I can't help wanting to rewrite it, but I assume any deviation from standard legal talk will cost us loads extra with the lawyer. (Who seems great, by the way, I'm not complaining about that at all.)

So, does anyone know of any Terms & Conditions or the like that have been written in a particularly clear or approachable way - or with explanatory notes? If we can find some, maybe it'll be useful precedent. We might even be able to create some less opaque boilerplate our fellow 4IPers can use.

Comments are now closed. Huge thanks for all the thoughts.

Comments

[Thomas]

Law school graduate here engaged to a lawyer with lawyer friends - generally speaking, Terms and Conditions are worded in the least "interpretable" language possible. The problem with friendly, witty, and winning language is it can be very open to interpretation, generally a bad thing in legal circles. However I'll ask around and see if I can turn anything up - lawyer fiance volunteers for the Artist Legal Outreach and they may have more approachable variations.

[Nick Asbury]

As a writer, I'm supposed to say that everything you write can be friendly and accessible, even the legal stuff. But when the lawyers enter the room, I think the writers generally have to make polite-and-tonally-appropriate excuses and leave. Even Innocent don't seem to be able to manage it. http://innocentkids.co.uk/magnets/terms-and-conditions.php

The best I've seen people do is to frame the legal stuff with a friendly apology and invitation to get in touch if something doesn't make sense.

That said, I've just done some quick digging and found this: http://www.webstock.org.nz/terms/

Not sure it would get past the lawyers though.

Maybe a good lawyer and good writer could thrash something out. It would definitely be a worthwhile exercise. Hope something comes of this.

[Tom]

Why not present a 'Summary' of the terms which is written in normal speak then put the full legal text underneath with the 'I Agree' right at the bottom.

like http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne plus http://www.flickr.com/atos/pro/

[Kim]

Ask Richard Moross for the T&C for Moo Studio - we had the same problem, and drafted something quite simple in the end. We also summarised it with natural language at the top.

YouTube's T&C are fairly clear, partly because they're written in very short, concise clauses, and well spaced on the page
http://www.youtube.com/t/terms

Twitter used to have nearly no T&C - this has definitely changed, but they do quite a nice 'boxout' of tips to explain the legalese
http://twitter.com/terms

Similar approach at Vimeo
http://www.vimeo.com/terms

[Ben Holland]

When I was buying a flat some years ago my solicitor created an accompanying version of the lease that was written in plain English, so I had the deeply legal version and then the DVD-commentary version. It was massive help and deifnitely made the process considerably easier in every way. And he didn't charge extra, before you ask...

[Nick Asbury]

This is a Ts&Cs template that AIGA supplies for its members in the US (recently updated). Not especially brilliantly written, but nice example of open-source Ts and Cs. D&AD should do a version over here. http://ow.ly/B9VO

[fraser thomson]

I had the misfortune to develop the mortgage T+Cs for a very consumer freindly brand. I think I spent the best part of 4 weeks of torturous sign off, many meetings with laywers until the early hours of the night and we still ended up with T+Cs that were about 70 pages long and that anybody other than a lawyer would not have the slighest. Since then I've put T+Cs into the boiling the ocean category and avoided like the plague.