If you’re still at the point where you are playing lawyer sometimes or all of the time with your cannabis business contracts, then this post is for you.
I grew up in rural Wisconsin with two parents who were raised in the wake of the Great Depression. My parents had a bunch of kids, and we did not have a lot of extra money beyond covering our necessities. I share this because when I talk to prospective cannabis clients who are worried about finances, I understand where they are coming from. They always want to know if we can discount our fees or sign off on a boilerplate contract they bought for $50 online or cobbled together from a few other contracts. Unfortunately for them – but also fortunately for them – we don’t work like that because nothing we do is boilerplate.
Lawyers and businesspeople talk about boilerplate in contracts, but hemp and marijuana business owners throw the term around differently than lawyers do. When business owners talk about boilerplate, they use the term to encompass any contract or contract term they think doesn’t matter very much. Often I hear, “We have already put together the business terms – you just fill in the boilerplate.”
I know that a lot of non-lawyers do not read every word of every contract they sign. When lawyers talk about boilerplate, we’re referring only to those parts of the contract that generally come at the end of the contract. That is the part of the contract that most non-lawyers never read and even some lawyers gloss over.
