Around the internet there are a number of sites purporting to offer contract templates for free. Aside from the usual caveats about there being no such thing as a free lunch, these contracts might be tempting for a business to use. However, they do not offer many of the features that IT Contract Templates offers, particularly things like:

Experience

IT Contract Templates are written with Anne Hall’s extensive IT law experience. She has been a dedicated IT lawyer since 1992, and that is all she does – she doesn’t juggle other types of law alongside IT law.

While free templates may claim to be written by IT lawyers, it’s impossible to know whether that is the truth, or who exactly is the party behind the document. Anne recently found work she had done for a client several years ago available for free download on a website, when neither the client nor Anne had approved it. With free templates you often cannot know who is behind the work, and even if that work has been stolen or not.

There is no risk of that with IT Contract Templates. Knowing where the contract has come from means the user can have a level of trust in the contract that they end up signing which they cannot have in a free template.

Responsiveness

Free contract templates are take-it-or-leave-it propositions. There is no room for customisation or changes, either by the user or by the person who created the template. This means that the contract is not unique and may not take into account the variables on a complex project. This means that it may take several downloads to find a contract which gets anywhere close to what a user might actually need.

With IT Contract Templates there is a level of responsiveness to feedback and to queries. Anne can make changes to templates as needed, creating outlines for new templates that take into account the needs of specific industries and projects. And since the templates are delivered as a Word document, the user can make changes they need without guidance as well.

Updates and support

A free, anonymous contract template doesn’t come with a person behind it to whom you can ask questions and get help from. IT Contract Templates do. Included in each package is a Skype call with Anne Hall, allowing a business to get help using the template. And a free contract is static – IT Contract Templates are updated each month, taking on board feedback from users and businesses to make sure the contracts are always usable and up-to-date.

Although it may seem attractive to save money and use a free contract template, they come without the quality, expertise and customisability of IT Contract Templates, and leave you with a much poorer contract - which could spell trouble down the line.