As a small business owner, a start-up entrepreneur or a freelancer, hiring a lawyer can seriously make a huge dent in your budget; even if it's for simple documentation. But then, one can't even afford not to have everything documented, because sooner or later you will get screwed over it.

An excellent example can be seen in the video below that demonstrates a social experiment that will make you realize how it feels like to be a freelancer. It's about freelancers who work on verbal agreements and get totally screwed because of it. Have a look:




It's not just about freelancers or business owners who need to make sure that any agreement needs to be documented, an agreement between any two parties needs to legalized, even if it's between you and your roommate.















That is why we would like to introduce Docracy to you. It is a free web service that provides legal documents for free.

"Getting screwed over sucks, whether it's due to a miscommunication, an intentional slight, or just bad luck. That's why we wanted to create a site to help prevent people from getting screwed." shares the website.

Docracy is a brain child of Matt Hall and John Watkinson who created the initial version of this service during TechCrunch hackathon. They realized how skeptical people can get when it comes to legal documents, and how they get screwed over because of it. So, they decided to provide such documents as an open source.

Docracy provides a variety of legal documents, ranging from real estate to non-disclosure, from power of attorney to employment. There is a special segment for freelancers and start-ups.

The legal documents are socially curated by communities, anyone can create, upload and edit a document for others to use; one can even sign a document electronically. According to the website, most of the documents are provided by lawyers, organizations like AIGA and of course users like you and me.

How legal is it to sign documents on Docracy?

Here's what the website has to say:

"Agreements signed using Docracy are valid and legally enforceable as we are ESIGN Act compliant. We use email addresses to identify the parties, and we encrypt all content. Whether you decide to type your signature or draw it, your contract is executed the moment both signatures are appended, with a timestamp automatically added to the online document and the PDF copy. Your signed documents are also securely stored, so you can access them anytime."

Now the question is, how reliable is it to use documents on this site as opposed to having a lawyer draft it for you?

Well, one can't really be very sure. When it comes to the Internet and the Law, there has always been a clash. So keeping a lawyer completely out of the picture is definitely not recommended, specially when it comes to tricky and important documents. What you can do is get the draft from this website, make the necessary changes if you can and have a lawyer review it for you.

Having said that, there are certain documents that don't necessarily need an attorney intervention. For example privacy policy for a website, standard agreement for design services, or an agreement between a freelance writer and a blog etc. For such documents a quality template should be suffice and Docracy is surely a reliable source.

I would again like to remind you that Docracy is not a substitute for an attorney or a law firm, but it is definitely a much needed solution for those standard agreements that can be documented without paying huge fees to a lawyer.

I would love to hear your views on this, you can share your opinion the comment section below.

Source: DontGetScrewedOver.com