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Contract check

Some of the most common questions we have seen over the years in our Slack workspace had to do with recruiter contracts and whether certain clauses were fair or not.

A typical recruiter contract has 12-15 pages (often separated into a framework contract and a project agreement) and is not easy to understand by someone who doesn't see these kinds of documents every day.

What can you do when faced with such a contract? You could google certain clauses that sound fishy or ask other freelancers in a community like Uplink, but you can't be sure that the answers you receive are substantiated. Alternatively, you could try to find a lawyer specialized in these kinds of contracts, but it takes time to do so and you might end up spending several hundreds of Euros and not receive a satisfactory assessment either.

So we decided to team up with an experienced lawyer and offer contract checks as a service! For a flat fee of 300€ (+ VAT) our lawyer will review your contract and point out common pitfalls, exaggerated fees, and everything else you should be aware of.

How it works​

We tried to keep the process as simple as possible:

  1. You upload the recruiter contract in our member area and answer a form with a few basic questions.
  2. Our lawyer will do a quick review of the contract and your answers. If everything looks good, he will start checking your contract immediately. If he has follow-up questions, he will contact you via email or Slack.
  3. You will receive the annotated contract and our invoice (300€ + VAT) within 3 working days.
  4. If anything is unclear, you are welcome to contact our lawyer and he will explain his annotations. Please note though that extensive follow-up questions or suggestions for alternative phrasings are not included in the original fee.

Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back!​

We want you to be 100% happy with our service, so if you're not satisfied with the end result, you won't have to pay the fee.

Feedback from freelancers​

This is the feedback we received from the first freelancer who checked a contract through our service:

Durch die klarstellenden Hinweise kann ich nun die Bedeutung und Konsequenzen der Vertragsklauseln verstehen. Ich konnte kurzfristig eine Änderung im konkreten Projektvertrag zu meinen Gunsten erreichen. Für eine etwaige Projektverlängerung werde ich frühzeitig die Formulierungsanpassung essentieller Punkte anstreben. Dank der Formulierungsvorschläge kann ich dann auch einen konkret angepassten Vertrag als Forderung vorlegen.

We're looking forward to receiving more feedback like this as we help more freelancers to deal with their contracts!

FAQ​

What kind of contracts can I get checked?​

For now this service is limited to contracts from recruiters/recruiting companies (e.g., Basisvertrag/Projektvertrag) or clients (e.g., Vertrag zur freien Mitarbeit). Do you have a similar contract that you would like to get checked? Contact us!

How many pages can the contract have at most? What if I have multiple contracts/files?​

From a recruiter, you will often get a "framework contract" with approx. 12 pages and a separate "project agreement" with approx. 2 pages. It's ok to submit both of these together to get checked. If you have more than two (associated) contracts or the total number of pages is more than 15, you can still submit them, but our lawyer might determine that it is not possible for him to check them properly for the relatively low fee of this service.