Consulting Agreement

[mugs82]

Hello. I work for a Consulting firm. In the last couple of months, we have been burned by couple of clients. They have either failed to pay for services rendered or blamed us when something else besides what we were working on went wrong with their networks. In the end, we spent a lot of time trying to please clients who felt they shouldn' t pay for our services because something unexpected happened or the client kept changing the scope of our project.

I am trying to come up with some sort of a decent service agreement to use with future clients. Basically, I want it to tactfully say that "just because we work on a network doesn't mean we will fix everything and possibly, our working on the server may cause it to crash if there are unknown or undisclosed problems with it." I also want it to say that that we are not the warranters for Microsoft, Novell, etc. Does anyone have a good example of this and would you be willing to share it with me? It would help me a lot.

Thank you.

 

[rwb1959]

Well... I don't know what your current "contracts" with these clients
look like but in cases like this, you don't really have many options.
The client may have a very heterogenious environment in which
all possible "side-effects" just cannot be realistically accouted for.
In such cases, I would recommend a T&M (time and matierals)
type of contract. In other cases, a well defined SOW (statement of work)
with a renegotiation clause for additional work outside the
stated scope may be more appropriate. However, when all is said
and done, two factors remain...

1- maybe the client is unethical and never intended to pay
2- the actual work done was not in accordance with the agreement

In the first case, you are probably best just referring the debt to
a collections ageny and cutting your losses.
In the second case, you may have to reevaluate the type of work
you are taking on and perhaps scale back the efforts.