How to Navigate Contracts as a Freelancer: The Non Paper Tiger Edition

(Editorial note: I originally published this over on the Hit Subscribe blog.) As I mentioned in my last post , I'm planning to write a column aimed at freelancers and small agency owners. And since I made this decision, I've been practically bursting with ideas of what to write about, to the point where Jonathan Stark's daily writing habit concept seems highly attainable. (Though ironically I've posted none for months because of a 2-week vacation that turned into a 4-week ordeal, and then the subsequent catch-up from a month off). For whatever reason, the first and most insistent topic that bubbled up was how to navigate, or not navigate, contracts as a freelancer or small agency. I think maybe this is because so much advice out there, swapped around by freelancers on venues like reddit , is genuinely and comically atrocious. It's a bemusing mélange of cargo culting (more on this shortly), arm-chair lawyering and good old-fashioned posturing that is completely unmoored from any legal, or more importantly, realpolitik, reality. But the real danger in taking any of this advice, for you, as a freelancer or small agency, isn't a legal danger -- it's a danger that you'll look ridiculous to the clients you're presumably hoping to impress . Contracts are a real, potentially valuable tool to think about including in your tool belt. But in my experience service providers almost invariably misunderstand their role and their real value. So let's do a bit of a deep dive into the role of contracts in your practice, so that you can use them to your advantage. Who Am I To Weigh in on This? My Non-Lawyer Bona Fides First of all, it's important for me to add a disclaimer that this is not legal advice and I am not a lawyer. Actually, I'm just having a little fun. It's really not important for me to say that because I am not a lawyer and there is no danger of anyone misconstruing this as de facto legal representation. I am not worried about being disbarred. But I am making a drive-by