For mobile applications, or product information about legal stuff, all those. People who study law?
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You wouldn’t want anyone who *hadn’t* studied law to write something like that. If it’s written sloppily, it may be unenforceable or even actively harmful to the business.
EULAs and TOS and such are legal contracts between the service provider and the end user. As such, they’re either drafted by experienced law offices in that subfield (e.g. EULA lawyers and/or paralegals who support them), or drafted by the company and then reviewed by such. It would be a colossal error, with the potential for *extremely* bad results, to try to use a EULA that wasn’t at least reviewed by a reputable lawyer (or their staff) prior to being used.
Depends. I am a co-founder of a startup and had to write about 30 pages of TOS, Privacy, SLA, etc. I wrote all of it with ChatGPT’s help, had a lawyer friend skim through it, and she said I did a better job than 75% of her colleagues.
Since some people have issues with basic comprehension, I didn’t copy anything. You can’t just “copy” legal agreements, that defeats the whole purpose. How do I know that agreement fits my company and my rules? So here is how I did it.
1. I read several agreements myself to see what sort of chapters are included and what part of the structures are mandatory. These agreements can be from WhatsApp to Spotify to anything else.
2. I gave ChatGPT a lot of information about my company, how I operate, what I want on the agreeement, what I don’t want, etc.
3. I then told ChatGPT to ask me even more questions so it could be better informed about my operation and company.
4. I made ChatGPT dictate each chapter, then handled them separately to include additonal stuff.
5. I had a lawyer friend read through and following her advice, revised the documents a couple of times.
Edit: I studied economics and have zero “official” legal knowledge.
For big companies, their in-house lawyers.
There are many specialties in law, it’s not just going to court and suing people or defending a criminal etc. There are law firms and lawyers who specialize in areas like intellectual property, contracts, conveyancing, and a multitude of other things.
For small companies or start-ups, it could be anyone who wrote it. They could have engaged a proper law firm to help them with it, or the company staff wrote it themselves, or adapted it from somewhere… But if not properly and “airtight-ly” written, it can be hard to enforce if/when the time comes.
I’m not a lawyer but I work in marketing, and whenever a client wants to add a “T&Cs apply” to their ads or comms, I always remind them that they can’t just say it, they better make sure they have a proper set of T&Cs available and accessible.
to add on to this topic, what’s stopping companies from adding lines like “I agree to be a slave to the company for 1000 years” since no one I know reads them anyway and just clicks accept
These agreements were written for the most part 25 years ago. Since then, a constant stream of low paid lawyers added and subtracted things, but the basics have been rolled over for longer than you’ve been alive
There’s a format that decides how they get written in a lot of ways, I think. Like, I wrote a handful of contracts using an app online, and it’s basically two pages of stuff like “We’re going to use this word to refer to you, the person reading and signing this.” And then there’s a lot of spacing and specialized design that goes into it. Probably most EULA documents were written based on a template that’s always used for a company who adapted it from another company who adapted it from some other contract document way down the line. I think this is what they mean when they talk about “precedent.”
And who reads it!!!
I think there should be a law against terms and conditions that exceed one page. How do you know that on page 43 in small print that you didn’t agree to donate all your organs on demand?
Lawyers mostly, they have to cover their bases and include some ridiculous stuff sometimes. Remember the joke about 15 years ago how the iTunes agreement forbids you from using the program to make chemical or nuclear weapons? Yeah that was real, it used to be in there, still might be.
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