Contracts Lawyer
Standard form contracts are everywhere. Many sophisticated consumer goods such as computers, phones, and other smart products are sold with standard form contracts. These contracts can also be called “contracts of adhesion”, “Leonine”, “take-it-or-leave-it”, or “boilerplate” contracts. All of these terms describe a contractual agreement where a contract is pre-arranged and inflexible, and the parties must either accept or reject the deal presented in the pre-written contract, but the parties are unable to negotiate or edit any of the conditions for the deal.
The terms and service agreements of many social media websites present an example of a standard form contract. If a person wants to use the website, they have to accept the contract in its entirety. They cannot try to negotiate any of the provisions of the deal. They must either accept all terms, or not create an account for the website. As a contracts lawyer has seen, if a website has a privacy policy that clashes with your views about how your data should be used, you rarely have the option to call or write to the website to suggest some sort of middle ground. These types of contracts are not always bad; because of these types of contracts companies can save time by having one standard contract that they can offer to every customer or client. That being said, standard form contracts do have some problems.
One problem may be a theoretical lack of true meeting of the minds due to consumers rarely actually reading and understanding the terms of the contract. Not reading contracts carefully and having a full awareness of your rights and responsibilities under a contract can be very problematic. One famous example of a contract which satirized this phenomenon is a software company that hid instructions for claiming a thousand-dollar prize in the terms and conditions for their users. It took several months for any users to read the terms and conditions thoroughly enough for claiming the prize.
Standard form contracts are often subject to consumer protection laws that require businesses to emphasize certain terms in a contract so that consumers have a clear opportunity to read the most important parts of a contract. If your company wants to save time and have a single standard contract for all sales and transactions, then you may want to consult with an experienced contract attorney so that they can advise or help you to write a contract which is clear and compliant with consumer protection laws.