Building Your Team Episode 1: Lawyer
Okay, so why am I here this time? So this new series that I'm going to start with this particular episode is entitled Build Your Yeam, and yes, it means exactly that in this world that we navigate as creatives, we need a team of people around us to keep us organized and keep us on point as any business grows, things get complicated and having specialized people in different areas will make your life more focused on your art, which is what you wanna do, and also give other people an opportunity to handle all of the other aspects of your business. One person can't do it alone. Believe me, I tried. I used to work seemingly 18 hours a day trying to keep up with all this stuff, and the minute that I started outsourcing some of these responsibilities and building a team of people around me, I became a much better person, and I slept a lot better in my art, I feel like got a little bit better too. So in the first episode of this build your team series, I'd like to talk about dumb lawyers. I truly hope this information helps you out, so this word lawyer, it's scary, it seems like every time someone brings up the word lawyer, it's always in a negative connotation, like I'm about to get sued or I'm gonna sue you... Someone's feelings are always hurt. And that kind of sucks. So hopefully by the end of this today, you'll be able to look at the word lawyer in a slightly different light and realize that they may be one of the most important players on your team. The first thing I'm gonna tell you is to simply talk to a lawyer before there's any sort of problems, hopefully the things that they provide for you will help you avoid any of these drastic situations that you're always used to hearing the word lawyer thrown around in. So being ahead of the curve is always a good idea, so let's talk about five things that a lawyer can do for you!
Number one, the most obvious thing that I think everybody's thinking about right now. I'll just go ahead and say it. It's the elephant in the room: having a contract.
Before you rush out to contract dot com or give me a free contract dot com or whatever those free websites are where they give you some documents that are super bland and don't really cover you... You should think about having a conversation with someone so they know your intricate needs and they can craft a contract for you. So here are some of the clauses in a contract you should see: Terms and Conditions, details about a gig performance schedule, cancellation policy, late payment fee configuration, staging, hospitality, artistic control, independent law, governing law collections, and usually there's a little thing at the end that just says “entire contract.”
Some of these we’ll skip over, some of these we'll talk about depending on how obvious they are. So think of terms and conditions is sort of like a big subheading of all the other things that I basically just talked about, so we don't necessarily need to talk about that, including the terms and conditions or things like performance fee, and maybe the schedule in which that they plan to pay you some people have 50% deposits and stuff like that, so that's where you list that information.
Performance schedule just lays out the general idea of when they are going to play, it may not have specific moments, but it may say something like, for a fourhour time block beginning at 8 PM, and of those four hours, three or hours or performance time and maybe one hour isn't.
Cancellation policy is pretty self-explanatory. What happens if things get cancelled, this is usually where a very popular clause, like a force of nature clause comes into play, and I think after this pandemic, a lot of people know what a force of nature is. So I don't really feel like I need to talk about that either, but if I do leave a comment in below and I'll give you the full explanation.
Late payment fees, is there a charge if they're late to give you your payment that you're requesting.
Band configuration, how many members of the band are going to be there.
Then we get to the topic of staging, that's a really important one. Is there gonna be stage there, is it a flat surface? All these things need to be laid out to make sure you don't show up with nowhere to play. Are they giving you any food, are they giving you anything to drink, are you allowed to drink on the gig? All those types of things.
Artistic control, this is sort of a defense measure against people getting sick or having family emergencies, etcetera, and the client coming back at you for maybe not having that one favorite person in their band that they really liked, and maybe that's the reason why they bought you in the first place, as we know, things pop up, it's not something that we can control always. There always needs to be grace between the client and the artist, so a clause like this in your contract is really cool. Independent contractors, maybe you have a clause in your contract, it says that we are an independent contractor and we are not an employee of your company for the day, this is kind of important for obviously a lot of reasons, governing law, this is establishing if there is an issue and this is to go to court.
A collection clause, that's like if you go to court and whoever wins doesn't have to pay the lawyer fees essentially,
and the entire contract clause, that just basically means that we're all agreeing on the terms that are listed above.
So obviously that's a lot of stuff. And if you don't have a lawyer that has personalized a contract for you, you could have some holes in your contract and you could be in trouble if something goes wrong, so moral of the story, book an appointment with a lawyer that you trust. And go in, meet with them. become his best friend and work out all the details for your business, specifically in the event you ever have to exercise clauses in the contract, you will be thankful.
Okay, number two the reasons why you should have a lawyer on your side is trademarking your brand.
Trademarks are really important if you're trying to build a company and someone else comes along and starts a company with a similar name and then files a trademark before you... You're out of luck. Now, I'm not a lawyer, so I just wanna go ahead and say that out loud. But to my understanding, he who files first is in the courts favor, so just be careful to always get a trademark done for your brand.
Number three, if you're a song writer and you're getting together with friends and writing songs, it's always important to have, you guessed it - a single song licensing form on hand.
If you know anything about the music business or music history in general, there's been lawsuits for years about people stealing songs or claiming they wrote certain parts of the songs, and those things are so hard to prove when you get done making a piece of art, just sit down and say, Hey, how much did you write to that, how much did I write of that that stuck, and how should we split this... Having this document on hand will save you a lot of trouble, and if you have a good lawyer friend, he can help you out with that number four: negotiating.
Negotiating.
So say someone wants your song or a piece of art to use for something, a lawyer can look at what they're trying to pay you and negotiate for you a higher number, it's always great to have a professional like a lawyer working for you to get what you deserve, it's kind of like those lawyer things that you see online all the time, we'll get every dollar for you that you deserve and blah, blah, blah, right. Same thing here, somebody wants your song or your piece of art, a lawyer can help you make sure you get fair value for that, they'll be through all of the contracts and everything, and make sure that you're not getting host... Let's face it, where musicians were creatives, this is not something we spend all of our days on, and I personally would just rather hire someone that I trust and that does solid work to handle this part of business, and that gets me to number five...
That's right, five. Number five is what we all know lawyers for doing, being there quickly in a time of need.
Now, it's really simple here people, when you need a lawyer, you gotta act fast, time is usually of the essence, so why wait until you desperately need one, it seems like to me, it makes the most sense to seek one out when you don't need one, to make sure, that you've got the right person for the job. When you need a most... So don't be a statistic, think about and research what lawyer would be great for you now. If you do the things that I told you to do in this video, it's likely that your bad law experiences will be kept to a minimal. So hey, I hope you enjoyed this first episode of build your team.