Yes. There are many changes including to how we write and conduct contracts. Over the years we’ve made a lot of mistakes, but we adapt, improvise, and overcome them.
CONTRACT SIGNGING
Contract signing is now done with a hash linked exclusively to your email address and IP address making it impossible to claim identity theft if it becomes a court action.
CONTRACT DEADLINE OBLIGATIONS
We now stipulate in every contract that if we, the designers request content or information for moving the project forward, and the client does not respond within 7 business days, this removes all obligations from Tarheel Media to deliver a product on a set date or deadline. As you might glean from this, we had exactly this problem from a client in Clinton, NC, while operating as Goldsboro Web Development, who argued that since there was no proviso in the contract specifying she had obligations to meet, we were obligated to deliver a turn-key product on the date defined in the contract and thus got a free website (actually 3, we’ll get to that) even though she took several months on multiple occasions to deliver the information we needed to continue with the project (such as product information, product images, and other critical media and content that stalled the project).
CONTRACT LIMITATIONS ON SPECIFICATIONS
Specifications are now created and worded into every contract. That is, we specify a cap on labor, we specify a cap on concepts, and we specify what labor types are included and not included in your future project. For example, the contracts will specify that you can only use 22 hours in the ROCK-IT tier design plans. Furthermore, it will specify that you are able to have 2 concepts drafted and after that, any other labor to create additional concepts, or labor that goes beyond specifications are billed on top of the project while the project is on-going (and payment is expected when invoiced). This prevents the problem we experienced from the client above where the concept was approved, the development scope was also approved, and at the very tail end of the development cycle (release) she decided to entirely change specification on the project sending us back to the drawing board and creating an entirely new website.
LEGAL TEAM
We now have a dedicated legal team (Merritt Webb) that assists us through all legal matters including contract reviews, arbitration, and civil legal defense.
OTHERS
There are many other changes to both the Terms and our Privacy Policy. We would recommend reading them and as an added bonus, we’ve made both legal documents as easy to read as possible while also making it a breeze to reference. In addition to a completely restructured Terms and our Privacy Policy, we’ve digitally signed those documents with signatures we can’t change which is admissible legal proof in court that the documents were in full effect when a customer agreed to them.
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