I have met a lot of entrepreneurs who proudly tout their one-page agreements like they have found the Holy Grail of business contracts. But that's rarely the case. Sometimes, 1-pagers are more like Dixie® cups: inexpensive, designed for uncomplicated situations, and if you drop one on the floor, it won't make too much of a mess. However, if you step on it, the cup crushes underfoot.
Think about it. There are only just so many "what ifs" that you can physically fit on a single side of 81⁄2" x 11" piece of paper using a reasonable font size. And what usually gets left out of the one-pager is the "elephants" - the big, huge, dark, and threatening issues that can cause enormous harm, like confidentiality and intellectual property violations. When they arise and your agreement hasn't addressed them, it's like an elephant stepping on a Dixie® cup. You get flattened.
My friend Sarah provides public speaking training to corporate executives. She swore by her 1-page agreement until recently, when she learned that a company she had worked with took the materials she had provided to the executive group and sent them around the whole company, providing her training modules, with them too! When I looked at her agreement I saw right away what it didn't include: among other things, the ability to resolve disputes in Sarah's home state, an acknowledgement by the company of the limited use of the materials (and compensation if there's further use), and the right to recover attorneys' fees in a dispute. I asked Sarah (as gently as I could) why she hadn't included these terms and she said, "I don't know - I didn't think of them . . .and didn't think I needed them. After all, I'm only a small company. I really wanted the business and didn't want to send this great, big agreement to the company with all the legalese-y gobbledygook. It might have turned them off." It didn't take long for Sarah to weigh the benefits of a one-page agreement on the one hand and the drawbacks of having her intellectual property ripped off, on the other. Her standard agreement now clocks in at a hefty 3-pages.
Let's look at some of the "elephants" that are often omitted from one-page agreements and why they may be significant to your business:
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