Your Legal Risk Audit — Part 3
Who Is Your Audience and How Do You Interact with Them?
The last part of your legal risk audit is understanding who your audience is and how you interact with them. Nowadays, a lot of freelancers and consultants can work with clients remotely, which means interactions are digitally based.
To understand what risks impact your business, how you want to manage them, and how that impacts your corporate contracting strategy, you need to be clear about who your audience is (and whether you have more than one) and how you interact with them.
By interact, I mean how do you market and sell to them? Where do they find you? And once they find you, how can they work with and/or learn from you?
And for folks in corporate contracting, you'll also want to consider who the end user of your work is. Sometimes it's your client, but other times, it might be your client's consumer. Knowing these things and how your work impacts not just your client, but your client's customers shows you where you might be at risk and what to do about it.
If you haven't already read Part 1 and Part 2 of this legal risk audit series, I recommend going back to those first before proceeding here.
When you're ready, let's get to it.
3 Questions You Need to Ask About Your Audience
The easiest way to identify your audience(s) and how you interact with them is to ask 3 basic questions: who are they, what data do they give you, and how do you interact with them?
Let's look at each of these questions in turn to see how this plays out.
Question 1: Who Are Your Audiences?
When you think about this question, you want to consider both your potential clients and your client's customers. Your potential clients are your primary audience. It's possible to have more than one primary audience. Your client's customers are your secondary audience. The best way to think about this is that they are end users who might interact with or be directly effected by the deliverables you create for your client.
Primary audience - As I mentioned, you can have more than one primary audience if you have more than one revenue stream. You can be a content marketer for corporate clients and a mentor for other content marketers so your primary audiences are:
Existing and potential corporate clients who need content marketing services
Other content marketers who are trying to grow their business
Secondary audiences - Here, you want to think about the people who interact with the deliverables you create. Most importantly, you need to consider whether your work could directly impact a purchasing decision and/or whether it is connected to vulnerable populations such as the elderly, children, or disabled. An example is if you're a website designer, all websites need to complete with certain ADA standards to be accessible to disabled folks. Here, your work directly impacts a vulnerable population.
Once you know who your audiences are, then you want to think about how you interact with them.
Question 2: How Do You Interact with Each Audience
To think through how you interact with your audiences, you want to start with how you market your services and end with how you deliver them.
That means you need to consider which social media platforms you use, whether you have a newsletter, a website, or any other mediums you use to market and sale to your audience.
There are regulations that control how you can market yourself on social media, how you can receive people into your newsletter, and what you have to tell people about the personal information you collect from them.
For actual clients, you want to think about how you communicate with them when you're in the process of onboarding them as a client and delivering your services. If you use any platforms like email, data storage, CRMs, or payment processors, you want to write those down.
Once you have this information, then you can move onto question 3 about data collection.
Question 3: What Data Do You Collect?
The last thing you want to consider in terms of who your audience is and how you interact with them, is what personal information you collect from them.
For example, when clients pay you, do you receive their payment information directly or do they submit it to a third party processor like Stripe? Maybe you send them an invoice with your payment information and they direct deposit the money into your account.
When folks sign up for your email list, what information do they provide? Their name? Their email address? Anything else?
And when folks come to your website, do you track their activity?
For client work, do they share sensitive or confidential information with you about their business? What about their customers?
The answers to these questions will help determine what obligations you have from a legal standpoint and they will also help you figure out which contract terms in your corporate contracts do and don't apply to you.
Once you have this all written down, let's get into the legal impact.
The Legal Impact of Your Audience Interactions
Marketing and Selling
Different agencies at the state and federal level have rules about how you can market your work. Some come from the Federal Trade Commission and some come from state level legislation.
Here are a few basic, common sense rules of thumb you can follow:
Don't lie about your services or work online. Only talk about the work or services that actually exist
If you promise specific outcomes (like 10x your income), make sure you have the data to back it up
For emails, do not sign up people for your newsletter who didn't agree to be on it. You can always give people the option to join your newsletter, but you cannot sign them up for it without their consent
Again, this is not an exhaustive list, but practicing honesty and consent can take you pretty far in this realm.
Data Privacy
There are a LOT of different data privacy laws. There are state ones, federal ones, and ones from other countries that may or may not apply to your work.
The key thing you want to do is make sure your website has a Privacy Policy if you collect any information about or from people who visit your website. If they can subscribe to your newsletter, buy a service directly from your website, set up a discovery call via your website, or submit a contact form, then you want a Privacy Policy.
A ton of lawyers have template privacy policies for sell. There are also a couple on Github available through a Creative Commons License.
Data from Clients
You also want to think about the data clients share with you when you're doing work for them. As I mentioned earlier, this directly impacts the terms of your contracts.
If you receive sensitive data, like confidential customer information, then you need to ensure you have the appropriate security measures setup on your devices to maintain the confidentiality of that information. You'll also want to ensure you have processes for deleting or destroying that information after your work is complete.
Lots of corporate clients have data policy addendums that they include in their vendor contracts that set out in depth information security requirements. Most freelancers and consultants don't have the infrastructure or the finances to comply with these addendums, so you being clear about what data your client is sending you will also help you determine whether these types of terms apply to your work. If they don't, you can negotiate to have them removed from the contract, which significantly lowers your cost of compliance with the contract.
How to Negotiate Data Terms with Your Client
Most freelancers and consultants working in corporate contracting aren't receiving sensitive data from their clients that necessitate additional security measures beyond what's in a normal confidentiality clause in a contract.
So when you come across a corporate contract that has extensive data security provisions, you'll want to bring this up with your client and negotiate to have those provisions removed since it's unlikely they apply to you.
Here are a few strategies that have been effective for folks I've worked with:
Scope clarification: "My work involves creating blog content using your brand guidelines so I won't be handling customer data or any kind. I don't think these data terms apply to that so can we remove them?"
Risk clarification: "I read through the contract and there are a lot of data security requirements. Do these requirements apply to or make sense for the blogs I'm writing about self-care strategies? I think they only thing you're sending me is your messaging and SEO guidelines."
Alternative proposal: "Since my work is going to consist of a few workshops, some individual coaching for your team, and strategic consulting, I think it makes more sense to talk about how we want to manage confidentiality through that process. The data security stuff seems to me more focused on customer data, which I won't have access to."
How to Think About Indemnity if the End-User is a Vulnerable Population
In addition to ensuring you're not agreeing to unnecessary data security measures in your contracts, you also want to consider audience interactions and end-users with regards to indemnity.
I work with a lot of medical writers and sometimes their work can impact how doctors treat certain patients. Since you don't have final approval over how your work is used and shared with customers, then you don't have any control over whether your work could potentially cause harm to or violate the rights of a vulnerable end-user.
In these circumstances, you want to make sure the indemnity provisions in your corporate contracts are mutual so your client is responsible for defending you in the unlikely event that you end up in a lawsuit.
Conclusions
You've now completed all three parts of your legal risk audit. You understand what kind of business owner you are, what assets you need to protect, and how your audience interactions affect your legal requirements. This foundation is a great starting point for approaching your contracts strategically so you can identify the areas where you need to charge more and/or mitigate potential risks.
The small businesses who get the best deals from corporate clients aren't necessarily the ones with the most resources; they're the ones who have done the foundational work needed to show up prepared to negotiate every deal. Knowing your business type, your assets, and who your audience is is the first step towards showing up prepared.