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In today’s Q&A, we are covering what sort of disclaimer (aka. terms and conditions) you should be including on your website, products or any other service for your own online business.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Our disclaimer – Reminder: We are not legal attorneys
- Coaches Choice videos
- Seth Godin – popular internet marketer
- Have a Question? Ask it here!
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, you’re listening to Q&A with S&J.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
What’s up, guys? Welcome back to Q&A with S&J. This is our mini-podcast that we come out with twice a week where we answer your questions. If you have any questions about online business, you can send those to us over at FlippedLifestyle.com./QASJ and we have a little form there where you can submit your question. Today’s question comes from Laura Goetz, just spelled Goetz?
JOCELYN: I am not sure. Laura, we are very sorry for butchering your name.
SHANE: I’m going to spell it, G-O-E-T-Z. Okay, Laura G. Laura G. writes:
“What types of disclaimers do you need to include in your websites, emails, and books?”
This is basically what kind of terms and conditions, and Laura, I guess you’re asking about legal liability, how to kind of exclude yourself from that where you make people sign your terms and conditions. We always preface all of these discussions with this simple point…
JOCELYN: With our disclaimer.
SHANE: This is our disclaimer about the disclaimers.
JOCELYN: Our disclaimer is that we are not legal professionals.
SHANE: We are not attorneys. So whatever we tell, take it with a grain of salt. If you really have a niche where you’ve got something with really complicated legal stuff or maybe there is liability involved, please go see a lawyer and don’t rely on what we’re about to tell you. That’s our disclaimer about disclaimers.
JOCELYN: Laura, this is a question that we have had a few times and that we’ve actually had ourselves when we were starting out in online business. It is very tricky to answer because like Shane said, we are not legal professionals. We are not lawyers and we are just kind of doing the best that we can, but what we did is we just went out online and found other websites who were doing similar things, looked at their disclaimers, and sort of modeled ours after theirs. I think that this is probably the best way to go about it.
If you are doing something specialized, maybe it’s like in the health industry, something to do with wellness or something that could maybe be harmful to people like as far as their well-being, you might want to go a step further like Shane was saying and possibly hire someone to help you to write a disclaimer for that.
SHANE: I have a pretty complicated niche in this because I sell football products and my football products are used by coaches and they are used to teach a very physical and violent game, so people can get hurt, people get hurt in football all the time. Kids get hurt. So my legal disclaimers, the same thing, come from the research that I did to other people who sell my stuff.
I went to places like Coaches Choice Video, anybody else that was selling products that were similar to my work where kids were learning drills, practice manuals, playbooks. I went and looked at their terms and conditions and I basically just took those terms and conditions and I kind of changed them around a little bit to fit my company, my need, my titles, and stuff like that, maybe combined a couple from different companies, anybody that was selling the same thing I was that was already an established brand.
I went to some school districts and I looked at their waivers of release that parents signed and things like that. I just kind of put together my own form and that’s what coaches sign to say that I’m released from liability if you know, and ultimately, I tell them, “You’re coaching your kids. Yes, you’re using my stuff but you’re the one out there to keep your kids safe. It’s your responsibility to do that and you’re agreeing to that when you purchase my materials.” I have a relative that’s a lawyer, I kind of let him glance over it to make sure it was okay, he said no big deal and that’s what I use for our disclaimers.
One reason that we decided to do that is because I listened to something that Seth Godin says. Seth Godin is a very popular internet marketer if you haven’t heard of Seth Godin. Most everyone has. If you have not, look him up, he’s got some great stuff online. He actually was doing an event and someone asked him this exact question, like how can I protect myself with legal liability? Do I need to have a lawyer draw up all these terms and conditions and disclaimers, things like that.
I’ll try to link to that podcast in the show notes if I can go find it but what he said was, something to the effect of, “My wife is a lawyer” or something like that and we write our own terms and conditions because at the end of the day, 99.999% of the time, Seth Godin said it’s not going to be an issue and any terms and conditions that you write are going to be fine in court. You just have to go prove your point.
Once again, we’re not attorneys. We’re not saying that’s exactly what you should do. The safest route is to go pay money to an attorney and have them write your terms and conditions. If you’re doing something a little more simple like we write lesson plans or we create just general playbooks for coaches or things like that, go out there and find an established company, an established person, who is in this space and has terms and conditions. Look at theirs and kind of tweak onto your needs and you should be okay.
JOCELYN: Another way that you can protect yourself is by starting up an LLC. That is a Limited Liability Company. This is something that we have done. It’s not super expensive to do. It’s mostly just filing some paperwork but that makes it possible for…
SHANE: It does give you some liability protections if people come after you.
JOCELYN: If someone does sue you, it protects your personal assets and again, I’m not an expert on all these types of things but I do know that limited amount about LLCs so it might be something you want to look into if you’re really starting to ramp things up online.
SHANE: Another thing you should do probably if you’re concerned about terms and conditions is they do sell insurance. Go find somebody who sells professional liability insurance and take out a policy to protect yourself. Anything you can do to protect yourself and the more you can do where you’re hiring professionals – hire insurance agents, hire lawyers – don’t listen to Shane and Jocelyn. Don’t listen to online gurus or anybody else.
If you just hear it, take it for a grain of salt, maybe good, maybe bad but go out and seek professional help, and that’s with everything you do in online business, not just your disclaimers, not just your terms and conditions. We have found you’re always better to go out and pay a professional whether it’s a web designer, whether it’s anything else, to get something done, get it fast, and get it done right to protect you. In a nutshell, Laura, don’t listen to us.
JOCELYN: Ignore the advice on this podcast.
SHANE: Ignore the last six minutes and 41 seconds of us talking into this microphone. Seriously, go out. Look at what you’re doing, look at what other people have done, and to be super safe, you might want to seek legal help.
JOCELYN: Hope that was helpful for you guys even though again we’re not experts in this field and hope you got that out of this podcast. Hope you all have a great day and we’ll see you next time.
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