Research - Terms and Conditions Tracking
Hi everyone.
I'm currently researching an idea I have had for a while and would really appreciate your input.
I'm trying to understand how a company tracks terms and conditions they agree to when using products.
Is it part of a contract?
Who would need to keep an eye on this?
Is it usually online or through paper?
Any input would be great, thanks.
Worked on a similar idea for global legal hackathon. The team went on to build lexlucid - please check that out.
Also tosdr.org if you are interested.
Your biggest roadblock is people not caring. So you can pivot to selling to legal firms as a start
Haha, people not caring is where the idea came from. Great, I'll take a look. I was thinking of targeting legal firms with this, just need to figure out how to pitch it to them.
Another tool to look at
Fossa.io
What types of products and which parts of the ts and cs? Are you referring to tracking things like service levels and reporting? Or more general information e.g. how many contracts do we have with juridiction X?
An example would be this -> https://developers.google.com/terms/
I could be way off with how these things are tracked though as it's not my background.
Speaking from experience (I am legal director for a large UK business), they are not.
The terms would be reviewed when engaging with the product supplier and any unusual provisions flagged to the relevant commercial stakeholder. In most cases, terms such as the above are non-negotiable so they present risk to the organisation in the sense that they limit our recourse against the provider.
We would retain a central record that we had agreed to the terms (or that an employee was using a product subject to the terms) but we would not necessarily track compliance with them e.g. section 4 of those terms is quite restrictive.
Does that answer your question?
That's great, very helpful indeed.
When you say hold a record that the terms are agreed to would you also hold what the terms were?
If they were to change would you need to be informed/what mechanism would let you know they have change?
For something online which has the potential to vary frequently, yes we would hold an electronic copy of what was agreed at the time.
Ideally, yes, we would be notified of a change but we are reliant on the relevant stakeholder notifying us - and even that is contingent on the provider notifying them.
Great. I'm thinking of building something that would handle monitoring and notifying the user of changes in lieu of the vendor providing this.
Do you think this would be useful?