Common Mistakes To Avoid In Your Website’s Terms Of Use

Terms of Use are documents that few people take the time to read. Users just click the appropriate boxes to show their assent to the Terms of Use. Due to this, there has been a push towards making Terms of Use easy to read and in layman terms.

However, this has meant that people skip a lot of things when making their terms of use. This can be quite costly in the long run, and could mean the difference between staying in business and turning out the lights.

The following are some of the mistakes you should avoid when creating your website’s terms of use.

Using Cut And Paste Or A Terms Of Use Template

When it comes to contract law, no two agreements are the same. If this is the case, why then do you jeopardize your business by copying another company’s Terms of Use or using a fixed template? These options are going to leave out important ingredients pertaining to your unique goods and services, and a lot of things can go wrong in the process.

Forgetting To Make Your Terms Of Use Enforceable

Just telling your users about your terms of use is not enough to make them enforceable. There are four basic requirements you need to fulfill before your terms of use can be enforceable:

• Adequate notice of the existence of the proposed terms.
• Meaningful opportunity for users to review the terms.
• Adequate notice that carrying out a specific action would signify assent.
• Users carry out the action specified in the notice.

Combining Your Privacy Policy And Your Terms Of Use

If you collect any form of data from your users, or a third party does it for you, your users need to know through a privacy policy. You should make sure you refer to your privacy policy in your Terms of Use. What you should not do is to combine them into one document. Doing that would make it harder to read.

Also, the Federal Trade Commission has encouraged online service operators to notify users if there is any change to their Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. You should keep these two documents separate so that you do not have to notify users of changes to both documents unless the changes are material.

Forgetting your Legal Disclaimers

Your lawyers always put indemnity disclaimers, warranty disclaimers, and limitation of liability clauses. Yet a lot of people make the mistake of not using these disclaimers in their Terms of Use.

Check out the following disclaimer ideas you can use for your business:

• Limitation of liability with a claims cap
• Customer or vendor indemnities for the misuse of services.
• Disclaiming liability for lack of network access or force majeure events.
• Third party links or services
• Disclaimer of warranties

There is a host of other things that should be included in your Terms of Use. Make sure you prevent any costly mistakes by seeing an attorney immediately.