Introducing the Bureau Standard Agreement

Sand and Dunes at Charleston, South Carolina

Owner Summit, an event targeting people who own and operate digital agencies, took place last week in Charleston, SC. Shops with skills ranging from marketing through design & development were on hand.

Amongst a wide array of thoughtful & helpful presentations from folks like Claire Lew of KnowYourCompany to Nancy Lyons of Clockwork was a presentation by a couple of lawyers. Ugh! 😅

Gabe Levine is Principal Attorney at Groundwork Legal, Inc., a Bay Area-based virtual law firm that provides legal services to the creators of digital products.

Gabe Levine and Josh Barrett teamed up to create a starting point agreement for digital agencies. If you’ve run a shop or dealt with contracts 9 times out of 10 you’re asked to sign paperwork that is not optimized for our industry.

One client of ours included language in their paperwork which stated if they weren’t happy at the end of the project they had the opportunity to simply return all of our work product and not pay for it. Unfortunately, in a service business all you’ve got is your time and we trade that for money.

After seeing this time and again these folks joined forces to create the Bureau Standard Agreement. There are a number of disclaimers listed in the document the most important of which is that using this document does not mean you don’t need a lawyer.

Josh is principal and founder of CreateLegal, a Portland, Oregon law firm designed for businesses doing creative work.

What it does mean is that you have a reasonable starting point for the conversations that happen at the beginning of projects. And, ideally, the more people that use this agreement the further refined and more sane the defaults will become.

If you’re a development heavy shop, like we are at Adorable, you should keep an eye out for updates as this inaugural version is targeting design shops and probably will leave you wanting for intellectual property carve-outs. As luck would have it Gabe has been our lawyer for the majority of our existence as a company. I can tell you that I am able to confidently walk in to calls with my clients because of his work.

The Bureau Standard Agreement is a helpful starting point to frame the conversation with your clients and counsel, if you’re not lucky enough to already be working with Gabe, Josh, or someone else who knows their stuff.