Part III: COVID-19 and the Wedding Industry FAQs
Transcript from Instagram live on March 12, 2020, regarding COVID-19 and the wedding industry.
On March 12th, 2020, Paige Hulse hosted an IG Live regarding COVID-19 and the wedding industry. Below, we have transcribed the video for your convenience...
TRANSCRIPT PART III:
DISCLAIMER:
As we get started, one thing that I want to let you know is that while I want this to be as helpful as possible, please know that I am ethically unable to personally respond to your exact scenario and tell you exactly what you should do, but I'm going to do my best to make sure that this is a prudent and productive conversation for all of us because a lot of the questions I've been getting are generally similar. That being said, if we have not met before, my name is Paige Hulse. I'm the owner and lead attorney of The Creative Law Shop®, which is where I house all of my creative law work. Just a brief history of where I came from, I used to be an oil and gas litigator. In that job, I handled primarily contract litigation, which has directly informed how I assist creative business owners and wedding professionals in the realm of contracts. I do have a second and separate law firm, Paige Hulse Law, where I do handle trademark registrations, estate planning, and one-on-one work. Before I begin this conversation, I have to give my standard disclaimer: while I'm an attorney, I'm not your attorney until we sign a client agreement. Everything that I'm speaking about today, I truly hope you find to be helpful - I would not take the time out of my day to provide you with information that is not helpful. While I do hope it is helpful, again it's not advice for your specific business. This is for educational purposes only.
RESOURCES:
My newsletter subscribers know that my team worked very hard for you guys overnight and created a download of our newsletter that I sent out last week, including the contract provisions that I referenced within the letter, for free. You can find it here. If you go to the footer of our website, you'll find just a tab that says newsletter freebies and all of the freebies I ever make are right there. That being said, let's go ahead and dive in. If I'm being completely honest with you all, when I sent out a newsletter about the coronavirus last Friday, there is a small part of me that felt a little bit weird about sending it out because I felt like it could potentially be almost a fear mongering-type perspective. At the time last Friday, this wasn't a pandemic yet, but we knew this was obviously an international concern. It was primarily impacting the US wedding industry by causing delays in shipments, primarily for wedding dress manufacturers and florists. With that being said, I am going to be speaking today primarily about some of the contractual issues that have been arising as of this week and those have to do with cancellation, termination, etc. I'm not here today to talk about my opinion on how this stands as a pandemic; my opinion on this as a health concern; my opinion on the stock market, or any opinion about policies or administrative level.
DISCUSSION:
I see some questions. "What if a wedding has been canceled, I booked? Do I owe the money back?" I'll get to that. This was a common one. It goes very much back to the deposit conversation. "What if an event gets canceled, but you've done the work and you have one more payment left?" My first response is to look at your contract.
Many of my wedding professional contracts ( wedding planner, wedding photographer, etc.) I have language that discusses like sets milestones in your payment provision because - for example if you're a photographer or a videographer -the argument is that you don't actually perform your services until the day of the event, but we all know that you're doing a ton of work. It's booked. It's taken that place on your calendar that somebody else could book.
Well, maybe on paper, you're not doing the work until the day of the event. We know that is by no means the truth. In that case, the way I've written it most times, we have those milestones in place. If, for example, 30 days out, I'm just throwing numbers out there, 25% would still be due or everything but 25% would be due. On the day of the event, that last payment of 25% would then be due and all payments would be paid in full. Again, it goes back to the postponement and transference of payments, those types of things you're going to have to look in your contract to get a specific answer about.
If you're in one of those scenarios and if you have already performed all of the work, if it's something like, with the person who submitted this question, I think it might have been some seminar that she was presenting at. I'll use the seminar as an example, like an online summit. If you've already performed the work and you don't think anything should prevent that seminar or online summit, whatever it may be from occurring, then that force majeure provision, right now it would not protect the person that you're in a contractual relationship with.
You may be entitled to your final payment, but again, that's such a contract-by-contract scenario that I know that I didn't fully answer it at all, but I really want to drive home the point that it's a contract-by-contract scenario. I highly, highly advise that you reach out to an attorney in your state to look at that.
I entirely understand that, as somebody whose entire family is very much on the forefront of, I know we're not technically in a recession, but this recession-type scenario. Having family in the oil and gas and financial industry, I am seeing entire retirements wiped out right now, I'm seeing really, really bad stuff happening very close to home, so I understand this. There's always a third option. There's always what you think could happen, there's always what your clients think could happen and there's always a third option.
I would advise that you look at, and again, this is not legal advice, this is business advice here, entering into some agreement about maybe you can't return the full amount, however, maybe you think that it's equitable, and again, this would depend on so many factors. If I were negotiating this, I would look at how far out the wedding. I would look at how much I've been paid, and figure out some type of scenario where, just spit balling here, maybe you retain your nonrefundable deposit or retainer, but return the other amounts that are owed if the client agrees to rebook with you at a later date.
They don't get preferential treatment of your calendar if you already have other, that's important, have other weddings booked, you don't want to be that person that's bumping other weddings and opening up liability for further breach of contract scenarios. I know that this isn't directly on point for your business, but I hope that it at least helps you think of a different perspective to attack this from. "If we need to return money, do we have a certain amount of time to do that?" It entirely depends on your contract. If I were to tell you any time frame right now, it'd be speculative and I wouldn't be telling the truth.
I really hope that this has been helpful.
WEBSITE:
The first people that started reaching out to me [about Coronavirus related matters] were people who were bringing in products like wedding dresses, florists, those types of people who were having a lot of issues with refund policies with their terms and conditions [on their website.]
The one thing I will note about that is if you are selling anything at all, you better have terms and conditions or else you're going to find yourself in this type of scenario and really wish that you had. The second, the really important thing here and the reason why I said this is or the reason why that I bring this up, is because a lot of times when I'm looking at people's websites or blogs, I get asked to do a lot of audits right before wedding season really kicks off, and most of the time, websites don't pass my audit.
If you don't have a privacy policy on your website, you are breaking law.
Literally, you're breaking laws in every way possible, federal, state and international laws. That's the only template, that's the only contract that anybody can say is actually a legal requirement. Everything else is a should rather than a must. That's a must.
DO YOUR TEMPLATES WORK IN CANADA?
Yes, that's a good question about being based in Canada. We have purchasers from all over the world, literally all over the world. We have a ton of people from Canada. What I say to anybody international is the same thing I say to people from different states:
Lawyers are not allowed to practice contract law across state lines. Generally speaking, every state has different laws about that. That's why I have contract templates. That's why I do not provide contracts one-on-one to the people that reach out to me. Legally, it has to be a template. I always recommend if you're in a different state than me, if you are international, have an attorney in your state look it over, or in your province look it over and make sure that it is the best and most protective document possible for your business.
Everything that I've written in the shop are templates that I've used or written for my clients, they're not just things that I write for the shop and I don't redact any information from them. I also know that some states have different laws.
CONTRACTS:
I can get on a big soapbox about this and I already have enough today probably. Every business owner out there, even if by coming to my shop, I hope that you find documents that are the most legally sound documents possible that I can provide for your business. However, there is quite literally no such thing as a watertight contract. There's no contract that can protect you in every scenario. There are none. It's not possible. It's not a matter of the strength of the lawyer. It's a matter of things like what we're talking about today, scenarios change, things come up.
Anyways, I won't get into that philosophical discussion, but there's no such thing as a contract that's perfectly written that will protect you in every scenario and that will make every client interaction flawless. I really believe this, every business owner needs to have an attorney that they at least know that they would reach out to in their state. If worse came to worse and all of a sudden something like this happens or you receive a cease and desist letter all the sudden, those types of scenarios, you have to have somebody on your team. It's not that you have to be on a retainer with them necessarily, but you need to know who to reach out to.
Of course, if you need any referrals, ask me. I have a pretty good database around the country. That's something that I believe strongly in and that's something that every business owner needs to have, needs to do. I hope that this is actually really helpful.
I'm going to end again with my most important point that I want to drive home to everybody:
We are not quite in a force majeure scenario yet. Even if you go to my website and even if you do download that freebie you'll get, 3 free provisions. Incapacitation provision is in there for free because if you get the Coronavirus, I don't want you to have to fight the Coronavirus and fight a client at the same time. I want you to have an incapacitation provision that would protect you.
Second thing that you'll find in there again, is the force majeure provision. That's free. The third thing that you're going to find is a dispute resolution clause that I also decided to include. I typically charge for all of these, but those are the three scenarios in my brain I thought could apply across the board. Where they're looking at as scenario: One, incapacitation, where you have the coronavirus. Two, we're looking at a scenario where potentially, like we've already discussed to exhaustion now, it's impossible for you all to actually come together and have the wedding. That's when the force majeure provision could kick in.
Then three, I want that dispute resolution in every contract. It's essentially like a prenup for you and your client, that this is going to be a highly emotional time and I want you to think about that. This is going to be a highly emotional stressful time, especially if we're talking about the wedding industry guys. This is not a time that is necessarily helpful. This is where we need to look for that third option and look at what meets our clients best where we're at because I believe without a shadow of a doubt, I see it way too often, clients talk, your reputation will spread.
But it's not just about reputation. It's about doing the right thing. As a business owner who is trying to help, whether you're a videographer or photographer, whatever you're doing, you're trying to do your part to make your clients wedding day the best wedding day that they can have. You're trying to provide the best services that they could receive. That's what you've been marketing yourself as. That being said, I think that it's time to take care of our clients and at least look at this on a case-by-case basis.
Don't make any unilateral wide sweeping declarations.
That opens you up to so much liability and I think that that is maybe one of the worse things that someone, could do right now. I touched briefly, I want to say this again, we're in one of the most emotional, you could argue, industries out there. I would make that argument. Wedding days are just simply emotional. This is where as business owners, we have to step up and we should not approach this from a place of fear.
You can make a plan and you can execute the plan. I think that you should preemptively recognize that your clients might be in a highly emotional place. This is where we can step up as business owners and truly take care of them by being able to handle this as business owners.
I don't want you to be fearful. I don't want you to make any decision impulsively that is driven by fear whether you recognize it or not, but I'm saying this because I've seen so many, and I've seen so many wedding professionals just this morning alone put on their Facebook page their new coronavirus policy. Please don't do that.
I don't want you to make any decision from a place of being impulsive, whether you recognize it or not or emotional or fearful. Again, we need to have a plan. That means you have to look at your contract. We need to decide as a business owner how you want your business to handle this and stand fully behind that decision. That's why I mentioned the part about clients talking to one another. If you treat one client differently, that can get back to you. I've just seen it too many times. I think that's something that we should keep in mind.
I truly recognize that this is a time where so many of us are going to be under a lot of very unexpected and very uncertain financial stress. In my mind, that's all the more reason why we have to really sit down and look this in the face and decide what plan we want to have and how we're going to execute it.
Guys, I only have a couple seconds left. I'm going to sign off. Thank you so much to all of you who tuned in today. Thank you. Thank you, guys, again for tuning in. I really appreciate it. Thank you for asking such great questions and best of luck to everybody. I know that we can get through this. Okay, guys, bye.
