A Freelancer’s Right to Choose

I’ve been thinking a lot about choice when it comes to the law lately. 

I’ve been thinking about how it feels like there are no choices when it comes to the law. Especially when it comes to the law and your business.

There are things you just “have” to do and things you “should” do that don’t really feel like a choice. They just feel like a requirement and sound like dogma. 

There’s this rule you need to follow and that rule you need to abide by if you want to do things right. If you want to do this business thing right and stay out of trouble. 

If you want to be safe and fully protected, then you need to follow these rules and no others. 

And that list of rules seems to be getting longer and longer the more and more our lives move from 3D to virtual. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to be able to run my business from the internet and I love that anyone with wifi and a computational device can launch a business, but that technology isn’t only a blessing. 

Because it keeps creating more rules. Legal ones. About what we should do and need to do to protect our online businesses. 

What was once a list of 5 things is now a list of 15 things you just have to do legally. And it keeps growing. You don’t just “need” to register your business as a legal entity anymore. You also need to register a trademark, create website policies, generate terms of service and/or a basic service or product contract for your business, buy insurance, get a business bank account, register for an EIN, and the list goes on. 

And on.

And on.

And the craziest thing is that you apparently need to do it all yesterday. And if not yesterday, then as soon as possible. Otherwise, you’re f*cked. 

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been one for rules.

That’s not entirely true. I am a lawyer after all. But what I mean to say is that I’ve never been one for rules that don’t matter. And I’ve definitely never been a person who subscribes to the idea that there’s only one way to do things. 

I personally have lived my life according to the following rule: there’s their way and then there’s my way and my way is the right way (obviously). 

That doesn’t mean I ignore the rules. It just means that I give them a once over or in some cases, a thrice over. I inspect them to determine if they make sense. And if they don’t make sense in every single context, then I start looking for other options. 

I start looking for more choices. Because believe it or not, there are choices when it comes to the legalities of your business. Lots of them. 

But it can be hard to identify them because there’s so much dogma out there saying there’s only one way to do things. In reality, there are a lot of ways to achieve the same outcome. 

To me, part of making the law more accessible to everyday people who work is helping to put more choices on people’s radars when it comes to the law. So I try to make you aware that there are more choices than they say there are. And by they, I mean most other lawyers.

I try to let you know that you have the right to choose the best option for you based on your specific situation. 

If you want to feel like you have a choice when it comes to the law and your business, then I invite you to join my newsletter Becoming Legalese Literate where I share all about what those choices are and how to figure out which one is best for you.