The Bureau Standard Form of Agreement for Digital Services

From the beginning, digital studios large and small have leaned on contracts, SOWs and MSAs that weren’t quite right. Either they were based on agreements that had been created from a different industry, cobbled together over the years based on bad deals or created by lawyers who didn’t quite understand the nuances of the digital world and our work.

We’ve created The Bureau Standard Form of Agreement for Digital Services to provide a solid foundation to help digital agencies build trust, accelerate negotiations and go from proposal to deposit more quickly.

The Bureau Agreement v2.0

The Bureau Agreement v2.0 improves and tightens a number of terms in the prior version and represents a starting point for website projects with front-end development. It includes three parts:

  1. The Bureau Standard Form of Agreement for Digital Services

  2. Standard Statement of Work (SOW) with sample language and recommendations on how your SOWs should be structured

  3. User guide that includes an overview, negotiating tips and information to help you put the Agreement to use

The Bureau Agreement is a collaboration between Gabe Levine and Josh Barrett, Attorneys / Principals at Matchstick Legal. Gabe and Josh specialize in business law and advocacy for creators of digital products, and work with many organizations within the Bureau community. Want to know how your existing agreement stacks up against best practices? Sign up for Matchstick's e-mail newsletter and receive a free “Report Card” evaluation of your current MSA + SOW in over 50 different categories.

Get the Agreement & Get Started

Use the button below to request the agreement—you'll receive a download link to access the files right away. Review the agreement with your lawyer, and make adjustments as needed to reflect your unique workflows, deliverables, branding, etc.

What’s Next?

If the industry doesn’t define the standard, who will? Our clients? That doesn’t seem right. Let’s create the standard together, adopt it, talk about it with our clients and use it as a tool to improve the way we do business.