New Templates for Online Professional Services

Have you started to provide your professional services partly (or only) online during the pandemic?

Do you provide professional services to business clients or customers, for example business or financial consulting services, or staff training services?

In the past, such professional and other business services were usually only provided face to face at the provider’s or client’s premises but, due to the severe impact of the Covid-19 restrictions, many such services are now being made available additionally, or only, online. Benefits flowing from online provision of professional and other services include saving of time and expense (due to the reduced need to travel) and greater flexibility as to the times and days when online consultations can take place. A further benefit is that the professional can potentially have a wider geographical market.

New online services template documents

In July 2020 a range of new Website Terms of Sale templates, for use by providers of online professional services to consumers, were added to the site.

Those templates have now been supplemented by adding some templates for use by a provider of professional services, where the client is a business client rather than a consumer. These new templates cater for several types of professional services and can be adapted to meet your particular needs.

The terms of these new templates cover online provision of live consultations with a client and also any standard or bespoke advice or information (in various forms), that the professional may wish to make available online to clients. The services are provided by means of live or (on demand) recorded video streamed sessions delivered via a cloud-based web conferencing platform provided by a third party. The platform used to deliver this online live or recorded content might be Zoom, but it might equally be any other platform enabling video streaming. Each template can easily be adapted if some other platform is used. The terms also cater for download by clients of text or graphics items on demand.

These new template documents will save you time and expense if you wish to produce a set of terms and conditions for provision, via your website, of professional services. Use of one of these new templates will also assist you to specify exactly what is offered to clients, how it is made available to them, and the appropriate contract terms governing the situation. The terms will assist in protecting both your legal position as provider and your client’s legal position.

If, however, you provide online services to consumers rather than to business clients, please instead see the accompanying subfolder which contains a variety of sets of terms. Those terms cover supply of online services to consumers.

Should you instead be using some other template?

These new templates are suitable for use when selling and providing video streamed and other items in electronic form (i.e. intangible items), via your website. This means that you would need to use other terms instead, if you are selling tangible items (e.g. hard copy books, or CDs, or DVDs) via your website.

If none of the template terms for providing specific types of professional services to business or consumer clients is suitable for the type of online services that you provide, you might instead consider using one of the generic sets of online terms which you will find in the accompanying Website Terms and Conditions templates subfolder.

If you instead wish to add terms to your website governing use of the website itself, please see the accompanying Website Terms and Conditions templates.

The contents of this Newsletter are for reference purposes only and do not constitute legal advice. Independent legal advice should be sought in relation to any specific legal matter.