Can our writing get us into legal hot water?
Should we be concerned about the indemnity clauses in our contracts? Our experts think so.
When was the last time you read a contract? I don’t mean scan it because you’ve been forced to scroll to the bottom to click “Accept”. I mean really read it.
I’m almost embarrassed to admit how careless I am when it comes to contracts. Yesterday, I whizzed through the bumf to open a new savings account, while last month I gave a cursory glance over my new broadband agreement. When it comes to my professional commitments, my latest guidebook contract marks the last time I made any attempt at ploughing through one, with its 18 pages of intentionally dense legalese. But, reading doesn’t equate to comprehension, and after a few minutes, my eyes glazed over, my concentration evaporated, and I crossed my fingers as I clicked to sign. It was only when researching this article that I started to understand how risky this strategy was.
We’re all aware of the perils of being sued for something you’ve written online. Katie Hopkins is one of the UK’s overachievers in this area, but I can imagine most news and political writers have had a brush with the very scary prospect of being taken to court. Travel writing is rarely a platform for publishing anything slanderous, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get ourselves into legal hot water.
Pull out one of your writing contracts and read through the indemnities clause. You’ll find a detailed list of everything you shouldn’t be doing in your writing: from providing inaccurate information to infringing on copyright, plagiarising other works, or being defamatory or libellous. But the most important wording comes before you launch into this who’s who of professional no-nos and goes something like this: “the Writer must continually indemnify and hold harmless the Publisher…” I’m probably not the only one for whom sentences like these invoke a near Pavlovian response, as my eyes start to glaze over just reading it. But indemnity is a topic we should be taking far more seriously.