If you run a website on the internet, you really must include legal disclaimers. Legal Disclaimers can protect you from many kinds of legal problems that greedy or disgruntled users of the site could cause. Furthermore if you are running a US based website, or a website that deals with US businesses and customers you need to follow guidelines laid down by various federal agencies.

The important question of course though is, “Where can I get legal forms for my website?”. You may be tempted to simply copy a legal form from another website, but this could be a terrible idea. Legal disclosures on websites are often produced by lawyers and are used under license, and thus protected by copyright law. If you are found to have infringed a lawyers copyright it could end up costing you a lot of money! So if we ignore this option, there are three other common choices. You could hire an attorney of your own to produce your legal forms, you could use a legal form generator, or you could use one of thousands of pre-prepared free online legal forms. You should weigh each option up against the other and decide which is best for your particular website.

(1) You could hire an attorney specializing in internet law and have him draft up some legal forms for your website. This is of course a very expensive endeavor and only recommended if you are running a “serious” website making “serious” money. For 99% of webmasters using a legal form generator or a using free online legal forms will be a more sensible option. You can get perfectly good legal disclosures at a fraction of the cost of hiring a lawyer.

(2) You could use free legal forms which you can find online. There are a myriad of websites which offer free legal documents which may be suitable for your site. This is certainly a cost effective method of acquiring valid legal disclosures for your website, but please make sure that the legal forms you use are correct for YOUR site.

(3) You could use a legal form generator. If you do not know what this is exactly, it is a computer program into which you input the details of your website and business. The program will then automatically generates a series of legal forms for your website. This can be a good solution if you are a webmaster and have several or a lot of sites you wish to produce legal forms for. If you are using a reputable form generator you can be sure that the templates will have been produced by a lawyer and will be suitable for a wide range of websites.

As we have seen it is incredibly important for you to provide legal disclosures on your website and you need to make sure that the forms you do use are appropriate for your site. It is recommended that you first decide how many different websites you are going to need legal forms for, and then select the best option for your situation from the three above. Remember, do not try and ‘borrow’ your online legal forms from someone else’s website – it could get you in trouble!