24 Nov 2025 · 3 min
John Jonas explains that contracts with Filipino specialists are legally enforceable but rarely worth suing over. Use them to set expectations instead. If you need court action, hire a Filipino lawyer through onlinejobs.ph.
Hello and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas and this is episode 14. Can you enforce a contract with your OFS? I got a question the other day from a subscriber who said, hey John, can you talk to me about writing a contract and enforcing it? And here's my answer. First, I'm not an attorney, so I can give you no legal advice on how to write a contract or what is legal. I don't have any, any understanding at all. You should not listen to anything I say on this subject. In fact, right now you should probably just press skip on this podcast because I am not qualified to tell you anything about what I'm about to say. I'm just gonna tell you what we've done. In my opinion, you just can't do this. You can't write a contract and enforce it. Actually, you could. It's just not worth it. And again, this is just my opinion. So you can write a contract and I'm sure it'll be binding in the Philippines. The Philippines is a very law abiding country. Generally, like their laws are strict, contracts are enforceable. I mean, it's all good. But if someone were to do something to you, what would you do? Like, would you fly there and take them to court? To me, there's so few things that would be worth this amount of trouble that it's just not worth it. So you can have a contract. Most Filipinos want to sign a contract, so that part about it is completely reasonable. They expect it because they want the formality. But typically I don't do it because I know that I can't enforce it. And, and it's not something I would ever go there to enforce. I've never seen someone else enforce it either. So that doesn't mean that you shouldn't do a contract, that you shouldn't write one, you shouldn't have them sign one that you shouldn't sign it to. I think contracts are a good idea. They put expectations in place. They give you an agreement to look back on. They provide some security to the person that you hired that you're serious about hiring them and providing work for them. Filipino workers like contracts. I just don't do it. But if it ever does come to having to enforce something in court, I'd probably hire a Filipino lawyer, which would not be really hard to do on onlinejobs. Ph, there are tons of profiles. If you go to onlinejobs ph, I just did this search, so I'm gonna help you out a little bit. Search for lawyer, attorney. Put both words in there. You'll get better search results. We're working on our search results right now on online jobs. They're a mess. It's our number one priority. You can also hire someone to help you write a contract for your VAs. Super simple. I also have a contract available as part of 1vaoa.com where at 1vaoa.com I you through the process of finding a great VA. Everything you need to do to find that, find a good person and get them started, bring them on board. And I have a contract as an offer to you as part of 1vaoa.com so talk to you later.
