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.
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.