| The most effective terms of service need to deal with the specifics of what your business does - in other words, the core domain. In the context of a typical startup, terms of service are essentially contracts between your business and your users, and there is a typical format for these types of contract. Most will start with an explanation of who the parties to the contract are and the defined terms that will be used throughout. The main commercial terms come next - these are the ones that should deal with the specifics of your core domain. An effective lawyer should be discussing your business with you in depth to understand what it does, and to identify what (if any) legal rules will apply to it. For example, a startup selling travel policies in the UK may need to comply with ABTA requirements, whereas one selling directly to consumers (rather than to other businesses) would need to comply with any consumer contract regulations. Outside of specific legal requirements your lawyer should also consider how your business operates and the point at which liability might arise and how it could be mitigated. Looking at the startup from your profile, I would want to delve into topics such as “what happens if a comment is not recorded or displayed properly and this has consequences for the rest of the team” or “how do you maintain confidential information while sharing comments amongst users” etc. The remainder of the terms need to deal with the general obligations that a company and user might have to one another (again using your startup - how and when is payment? What happens if payment is late? How long do you retain deleted account data?). There is also a bunch of more general contract law stuff which is often included (region dependant) which deals with issues like “where are disputes heard?” (the ‘jurisdiction’ clause) and “what happens if we don’t do something we said we will do on our terms?” (the ‘no waiver’ clause). This is commonly known as boilerplate and is often overlooked, sometimes with dire consequences. It’s unfortunate but true that many lawyers will take on the job of drafting terms without even understanding the above separation of concerns and instead dish out a template which only really deals with parts 1 (who) and part 3 (general stuff). The real value of engaging a lawyer lies with complex domains (finance, IP, consumers). Your startup seems fairly straightforward and low risk to me and there is no reason you cannot draft a set of terms yourself to get going. I suggest looking at a few similar sites - not to copy but to understand how they do things and to then try and write your own using similar principles to those above. Probably the same way you read open source code to see how others do what they do. For a simple comparison, consider this - terms of service are kind of like CRUD apps. There’s a server, a user, a bunch of boilerplate (auth, create, read, upload, delete) and then hopefully some detailed business logic which actually does something useful. |