In this video, online business attorney Brittany Ratelle walks freelancers and other service‑based entrepreneurs through a practical legal checklist to ensure their businesses are compliant and protected. She emphasizes that the advice is informational only and not a substitute for personalized legal counsel. The checklist covers: (1) drafting a solid client service or master service agreement with a tight scope of work, clear revision, change‑order, and pricing terms; (2) adding required legal documents to a website footer—privacy policy, terms of use, copyright notice, and any disclosures; (3) correctly classifying team members and using appropriate independent‑contractor or employment agreements to avoid misclassification penalties; (4) incorporating or registering the business, typically as an LLC, and creating an operating agreement (a “business prenup”) to protect assets and define partner roles; (5) preparing specific agreements for any additional offerings such as courses, memberships, or physical products; and (6) leveraging her Creative Contracts resources for templates and personalized recommendations. Throughout, she stresses proactive protection, clear communication, and the importance of having written contracts to prevent disputes and legal exposure.
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Are you a freelancer or other service-based business and wondering what exactly are you supposed to do to get your business legally legit protected? I'm online business attorney Brittany Ratelle, and in this video I'm gonna walk you through my exact legal checklist for a business just like yours. Whether you are a graphic designer, balloon artist, copywriter, web designer, or any other service-based business, I've got you covered. Now, while I'm an attorney, I'm not your attorney. So remember, anything that you hear in this video or any of my other resources is purely for informational purposes only. It's not official. Legal advice and it does not establish an attorney-client relationship. If you have any questions, please consult with someone in your jurisdiction. Okay, my first tip is that you want to protect the client service relationship. This is the moneymaker, like Ashton Kutcher says. Means that the most important proactive legal thing you can do is to have a really solid client service agreement or master service agreement. This is going to be the written contract that talks about who is doing what, when, how you're going to be working together, how a revision's going to work, and be really specific. It also should have a very tight scope of work, making sure it's a really clear, bound read example of exactly what you're going to be doing to provide a service for whoever it is that you're providing it for. This is especially important for my creative service providers. If you are providing any type of deliverable, especially if that deliverable is dependent upon the client doing certain homework, you've got to make sure that your scope of work is really tight and that you have language that addresses things like change orders or rush fees. So you could protect yourself and make sure that you're not working for less and less money and hating yourself and the client in the process. I always like to make sure that you have priced out something that is above your hate rate, and then you've made sure that you've built in enough price to make sure that you can be excited or at least enthused about the project and not hate the project enough that you wish you never would've taken it on in the first place. You also wanna make sure that this service agreement talks about what the timeline or schedule is going to be. Make it very specific how many rounds of revisions they get. This is especially important for any of my graphic graphic designers, brand identity designers, or web designers, or anyone else who doesn't wanna deal with comments like, make the logo bigger, or I don't know what it looks like, but I'll know it when I see it. We've all had these headache clients. One way you can reel them in is making sure you have a solid service agreement. My next tip is to make sure that you get your website footer compliant and make sure that there is something in the footer of your website about legal docs. You need to have a privacy policy, website terms, a copyright statement, and any disclaimers or disclosures related to what you sell and how you sell it. If you don't have any of that, or if you're not sure where it came from, have no fear. I got you covered. Head over to Creative Contracts and get my Website Legal Bundle, my number one bestselling product, because it's got everything you need to get your website legally legit and on your way. My next tip is that you wanna make sure that you've set up proper boundaries with your team members. You've been growing your team, and especially if you have some more of an agency model, you gotta make sure that those team members are protected with either independent contractor agreement if they're a 1099 or a W-2 agreement if they're an employee, and make sure that you know that The difference, it's all too easy in today's day and age to grow a team with a lot of amazing independent contractors and 1099s. However, if those people's role starts to be really central in your business and they start doing employment-like things, or you have some agreement that make it sound like they're employees, then you could be at risk of misclassification, which could subject you to hefty state and federal fines. Make sure if you have independent contractors in your business, you have them sign an independent contractor agreement and If you have employees, they should be signing an employment agreement. My next tip is to make sure that you incorporate or register your business with your state and provide some sort of asset and legal protection for yourself. The number one way that most people do this is with LLC or a limited liability company. Flexible, cheap, hard to mess up, and easy to maintain. Next, you're going to want to make sure you sign that business marriage prenup or your operating agreement. This is a really good idea if you're a single-member LLC, even if it's just you and your business. A lot of banks require operating agreements and a lot of states require them too. But this is hands down critical if you have a business partner in your business, even if that's a spouse, neighbor, especially if it's a friend or family member. Get things in writing about how your business is going to be run. Make sure that you've got that business prenup talked about and signed, and that it becomes part of an ongoing conversation to make sure that you and your business partner are on the same page. My next tip is to make sure that you get people legit. As your business starts to grow and you maybe add on an online product or a course or a membership, or maybe you also start selling a physical product in addition to having your service. If you have any of these things set up, there's certain agreements that you wanna have to protect these types of relationships and to make sure that people have really clear expectations. Check Creative Contracts. I have a free quiz on there that you can plug in exactly what you're doing in your business, and it will spit out a personalized recommendation for what you need to get your service-based business legally legit. I'm online business attorney Brittany Ratelle. If you have any questions about any of the stuff I've talked about today, drop them in the comments below. Thanks so much for joining me here. Make sure that you like and subscribe to this channel so you don't miss any of my great weekly videos that I have dropping.
