Our Oregon Business Lawyers review, draft, and negotiate the terms and conditions of legal agreements and contracts, allowing businesses to make good decisions about the risks of any transaction.
We can assist a business stay in compliance with IT contracts through the development and procurement process. We assist clients with software industry contracts, including licensing agreements and distribution agreements.
It may be necessary to work with a designer who is a contractor or an employee, in which case it is a good idea to abide by employment laws.
It is important to determine the scope of work, time frames, approval of work, and ownership of material before commencing with a web development project.
A web host should prepare terms and conditions of hosting the sites of other people, disclosing and disclaiming risks, obtaining representations, and reserving rights to comply with law enforcement authorities.
If a business is having other individuals write or develop content for a website, the business should set clearly the terms of use and ownership of the content.
Businesses providing advertising to clients will want to clearly spell out what is being sold and that there are no guarantees to results, and they may wish to build into the contracts enough flexibility as their business model evolves in order to adjust contract terms.
If a business collects data on visitors to its site, it should explain how it uses the data, especially if it asks for information to be entered. Collecting certain types of information, for example credit card information, carries with it a high standard for data security and businesses can be liable for identity theft if they did not adequately protect client data.
Businesses should have terms of use of their websites to explain that they are not trying to facilitate any illegal activity and to limit their own liability for any activities taken by visitors. Naturally the business should also monitor usage of their website and stop such activities.
Businesses may have an IT consultant available on call and the business should enter into mutually agreeable terms to ensure the consultant is available for reasonable amounts of time.
Businesses may hire an individual for a limited duration consultation project.
A business may hire an individual to install hardware. A network engineer can potentially cause great harm to the business if data is lost or the business is disrupted due to malfunctioning equipment.
Businesses may use temporary employees and will want to be clear what qualifications they need and what they are willing to pay so that those requirements are adequately met.
A company may develop its own software in-house and will want to be clear about who will be able to continue to maintain and improve on the software.
A company may have unique needs and may develop its own software in-house.
A company may wish to obtain a continous support and maintenance agreement from the developers of the custom software.
A business will want to consider ownership of intellectual property of any work product.
A developer may wish to distribute the software under a click wrap license without the customization of terms.
A developer and vendor may enter into a master software license.
A developer and a vendor should agree to a nondisclosure agreement, especially the business that shares business strategic information with the software developer.
The business should obtain an assignment of any copyrights if it intends to continue to update the product on its own.
A developer may distribute its product under a shrink-wrap license.
Contact us at (503) 274-9001 or by CFLink to obtain assistance with information technology (TI) contracts and to have us review a contract.