A consulting agreement template can be one of the most crucial documents to have if your consultancy is taking on multiple clients at any given time. This document – also known as a retainer agreement template for consulting services – helps to lay out the terms and clauses that both the client and the consultancy would agree to follow.
Here’s a sample Consulting Agreement template that can be easily customized and adapted to meet your requirements. It’s free to download and use.
What is a Consulting Agreement?
A consulting agreement is often seen as a formal foothold to any client-consultancy relationship. The document should be considered as a win-win for both the consultant and the client because it protects consultants from any misgivings or misinterpretations about salary and expenses while also clearly laying out what the client expects the consultant to deliver.
The consulting agreement is an excellent way to provide further exposition on the scope of the services being offered or what exactly the client has hired the consultant for and what is expected to be delivered at the end of the consultancy.
Why Use a Consulting Agreement Template?
As you may begin to take on multiple clients, you may find that many consultancy agreements begin to look quite familiar. This can especially be the case if you are offering similar clauses to most or all your clients. An example of these are the clauses around dealing with confidential information or intellectual property ownership, there is a chance that these clauses will not change. Yet, many may still find that for every new agreement they draft up for a client, they are simply trying to find different ways of saying the same thing. But this should also be where you realize the importance of a consulting agreement template.
At the very least, you should have a simple consulting agreement template in your arsenal because it is a great way to optimize your workflow when you are dealing with multiple clients. Having a template that is as easy as filling in the blanks helps both a consultancy and the client to quickly deal with the terms of their agreement and gives more time to deal with the real work.
Any consulting agreement template should have details about the following:
Services Delivered
This details information about what the client expects from the consultant during and at the end of the project.
Intellectual Property Rights and Ownership
This details information about how any intellectual property which is created during the consultancy is treated.
Payment
This details information about how often the client will pay the consultant and what their rate is.
Confidentiality
This details information about how the consultant would handle any confidential information they come across and what freedoms they have when it comes to sharing that information.
Term
This details information about the term of the project or how long the project is expected to go on for.
Once you already have these details in place in a consulting agreement template then only minor changes may be required before the document is ready for sign-off and what may have once taken hours to complete would now be ready in minutes.
Helpful Tips to Remember
This free consulting agreement template is indeed a document that allows you to do more in the same amount of time, but it should not be considered as being set-in-stone and is still a basic consulting agreement template. No template is a full solution, and one should not hesitate to add or remove clauses depending on what is felt to be beneficial to both parties.
