Legally Blinding: Shining Lawsters

Sooner or later, every young Developster, needs to think about their potential start-up as a legal entity, and Developster itself, is no exception. For kids our age, this is a whole new ball game! That said, with all the T and Cs thrown at us these days, we’re not altogether unfamiliar with the processes, and just as we find resources online to help us learn to build tech products, we can also educate ourselves about some of legal aspects. In our Kohknowco Lab class, if we’re writing code, or developing a brand, we’ll often seek advice and feedback from a professional — law is no different. The Developster Team is fortunate to have some very supportive mentors, two of which are Mark Cathro and Gareth Clendinning from local law firm, Duncan Cotterill. Mark is a Partner and Gareth is a Legal Advisor.

We’ve been wondering — when is the best time to form your start-up into a legal entity, a company? Especially at our age. We’re still building the product and have yet to get our first intake of users onboard, so monetisation is a little way off. We’re also still at school and our “income” is mostly pocket money from Mum and Dad ;). We thought it best to seek legal advice. Mark was on our Canopy Wall (it’s a Kohknowco thang) as a Law mentor (Earth Guardian), so we decided to call for help.

Mark and Gareth came in and talked to us about the process of setting up a company, some of the structures we should think about, shares, branding and IP, T and Cs, privacy policies, and importance of getting a good accountant. It was really interesting and we started to get a REAL idea of what was involved in creating your own start-up.

Mark has set some tasks for us to do: Do some research and write our own T and Cs and Privacy Policy. He’s sending us some exemplars and will then check over our work. Thanks so much, Mark and Gareth! We will soon be more legally informed.

So kids, keep an eye out for our T and Cs and Privacy Policy over the next few weeks and feel free to critique and use these as exemplars for your own projects. We want to start sharing these stories, to help other kids understand the processes they’ll need to go through.

Lots of Love, The Developster Team

@DevelopsterTeam / @bluegold4ever / @kohknowcolab / @kohknowco

First published: Saturday, 16th April, 2016.