Legal Portals – Supercharge your Business

Legal portals will help close deals faster and on better terms, all while providing a great experience for you and your client.

Legal Portals? Huh?

Legal portals are websites dedicated to your legal function. Specifically, you would post your standard terms and contracts online. Today, many small businesses already have privacy policies on their website. However, they miss the opportunity to go further. They forget they can post any legal document online. For example, you might include your subscription agreement, partner agreement, terms of service, beta tester agreement, or even terms specific to each product.

Smart businesses, especially major tech companies, post standard versions of their legal documents online in their legal portals. The simplest way to start is to note the few fields from your current template documents and get rid of them. You would pull out the parties’ names, the effective date, signature blocks, maybe pricing and service details; anything that usually changes from client to client. What remains can be posted online as your standard terms.

Legal Portals – How-to:

The next step is to present your standard terms to your client. It makes life much easier (as explained exhaustively below) when you can throw a one-liner into your invoice along the lines of:

By paying this invoice, you agree to the terms and conditions set out at https://example.com/standard-service-terms/.

You can use this language in an invoice with the pricing and other missing details. Look at how Adobe includes links to standard security terms and specific terms for several products in their sales order. This is how my current business (https://reference.legal/) currently contracts. We have an invoice with the pricing and a link to our standard terms.

Not everyone uses invoices. Alternatively, you can use website forms, click-wrap, text messages, or even just a much shorter Word document. We’ve all seen links beside the “Sign up!” button for most apps and the small print when you enter a contest. Long story short, you have a lot of options.

A key tip for serious transactions is to always include an area for “additional terms and conditions” so you can negotiate and override your standard terms. This works best for invoices or quotes for products and services, but might be less relevant if you’re talking about a code of conduct for new registrations. For example, if a client doesn’t like the interest rate in your standard terms, you shouldn’t change your webpage for that one client. Instead, you can include in the additional terms section something like:

Notwithstanding section 4.5 of the Standard Service Terms at https://example.com/standard-service-terms/, it is agreed that the interest rate on late fees will be 1.2% per annum instead of 2.5%.

Adhesive Terms, Faster Close

Let’s get to why you might want a legal portal. The first reason is adhesion or “stickiness”. Contracts of adhesion is a legal term. It means the contract is presented in a “take it or leave it” fashion by a much stronger or larger party. Take Microsoft as an example. You really don’t have any ability to negotiate the terms when you open an Xbox account. This happens for airline tickets, bank accounts, and any other relationship where you have no bargaining power whatsoever.

Posting your documents online gives the illusion of stickiness. Most businesses just don’t have a legal portal and having your own will give your business an air of sophistication. It is ironic. Pulling out a few fields from your template and posting it online can be done for almost no cost. But if you take this extra step, you will be in the same league (for legal tech) as Microsoft or Adobe. I don’t know why it isn’t more common, but the legal profession’s aversion to technology gives you an easy opportunity to stand out.

The reality is, when you send a Word document to your client, you are practically inviting them to make changes. To view the document, they will use the same interface as the one they edit documents with. We just don’t have the same relationship with webpages, which are always fixed. With legal portals, your clients are less likely to:

• Waste time fixing spelling and grammatical mistakes
• Send the document off for a lengthy legal review
• Redline your document
• Negotiate the meat of the terms

The simple hyperlink in your invoice is a massive shortcut through a lot of bureaucratic red tape and basic human psychology. Your duty (ethically) is to draw your client’s attention to the contract and to make it readily available. It isn’t your duty to put a target on your back and to invite your client’s legal team to make changes.

Clean Client Experience

Despite being a practicing lawyer with friends and colleagues in the legal profession, I cannot name a single person who genuinely enjoys reading contracts. Personally, I get a sinking feeling whenever someone presents a 15-page contract. There are just two outcomes: you either read the document or you don’t. In both cases, a simple link is a better experience for the client.

There’s a good chance your client won’t even read the terms (somewhere between 40-90% for clickwrap agreements according to a 2001 survey). Though we were all taught to read everything we sign, most don’t. When you present a 15-page contract to your client that they doesn’t intend to read, it comes with some negative feeling. It might be guilt or annoyance. Regardless, you don’t want to associate your business and brand with that feeling right out of the gate.

The other scenario is when your client actually reads your terms. Reading PDF documents is (in my opinion) a terrible experience. Put that text on a web browser and you can zoom in and out and you can read it on your phone or tablet. It is much easier to read and digest, though harder to mark up. In fact, I did a whole long post on why web-formatting is so much better than PDFs or paper documents.

At the end of the day, you want the best experience for your client. Contracting is a painful part of doing business, but it’s also a place where you can score some easy wins on the cheap.

Built-in Contract Management

Did you know lawyers spend 11.2 hours a week dealing with challenges related to document creation and management? The 2012 IDC paper specifically calls out 2.3 hours a week just searching for documents. The hot topic in legal tech today is contract management, and most of it is just organizing your documents and knowing what’s in them.

Small businesses sit in the underserved middle. You have more contracts than you can keep track of, but you don’t have tens of thousands of clients to justify the expense of a legal operations team or an expensive AI SaaS service. What you will certainly have, however, is some way to manage your quotes and invoices. Companies like Stripe and Square have made invoicing so cheap; I can’t conceive of any real business that isn’t meticulously tracking their invoices. Contract management, in contrast, is unreasonably expensive as a new and untested product. Even if you were willing to pay the large price tag, contract lifecycle management products fail to deliver the expected results in 50% of implementations. I would guess that most of your documents are sitting in your email inbox somewhere.

Going with our legal portal and invoicing strategy, you have a handful of standard online terms to keep track of, and that is all. Anyone who wanted special terms would have made those changes to the “additional terms and conditions” field of the invoice. When you generate a report of your invoices, you can run down the list and see every variation of your contract you’ve ever made. Best of all, you didn’t have to pay $35,000 a year for it (and yes, that is an actual price recently quoted for me).

Conclusion

Some processes are just so painful, no one wants to look at them. Getting contracts signed is one of these horrible processes. When you play along and ignore the inefficiencies, you overlook the obvious. What are legal portals? They are just static webpages. They are also one of the easiest and cheapest ways to supercharge your business.