Despite doing freelance web work for 9 years, I’ve never been confronted with a situation where I needed to have a client sign a contract. A lot of my clients have been smaller-scale businesses that highly value flexibility, so contracts tend to freak them out a little. Plus, not having attorney fees as part of my overhead allows me to keep my prices more reasonable. It didn’t really bother me because I’d found the perfect way around this… I would upload the work I did for them to a password-protected test area to show them the work was complete and I uploaded it to their web space when they paid me. I was basically holding their site hostage but it worked well for all involved.

I’ve done small-scale photo shoots for a couple of clients as well, but it wasn’t until recently that I did a shoot with the whole studio lighting set-up. I did headshots for an actor who I had met recently while shooting photos stills for a friend’s short movie, so I thought it would be a great way to get some new experience and make a little extra beer money. We agreed upon a set hourly amount (part of which I was going to give to the friend who had brought over his studio lights) and the actor asked if he could pay me when he got back from a small trip, which I agreed to.

After he returned, I gave him the CD with proofs on it and this is the point where I should have collected what he owed me. He e-mailed me later to tell me how much he loved the photos and that he hadn’t picked one out yet for me to edit, but that he would in the next few days. Sure enough, I get another e-mail from him telling me which one he selected, but then a couple days after that he e-mails me to say he decided to go with someone else. I was really surprised by this because he’d been completely happy with the way everything went up until this point. Even worse was that he was offering to pay me 1/4th of what we had previously agreed on, which was just insulting at the low rate I had given him to begin.

I went back to check old e-mails and txt msgs to make sure I hadn’t been mistaken about our agreement, but he was clearly trying to weasel his way out of paying me. As we went back and forth disputing this, he started bringing up all these problems he had with the way the shoot went down. Since this was the first I’d heard of these complaints, it was obvious he was trying to justify not paying me. Finally, he did end up paying half of what he owed me, but the whole experience really made me wonder if I need to re-evaluate this whole “no contract” thing I’ve been doing so far.