From DocuAgree
Why We Haven't Added an Arbitration Clause
Read the terms of service on most SaaS products and you'll find a clause requiring disputes to go through private arbitration instead of court, usually paired with a waiver of your right to join a class action. DocuAgree's Terms don't have one. Not because we decided against it forever — because it's not the kind of clause that belongs in a template, and this product is still pre-launch.
What that clause actually does, in plain terms
A mandatory arbitration clause requires disputes to be resolved by a private arbitrator instead of in court — generally faster and cheaper for the company, and generally more limited for the customer in what can be argued and appealed. A class-action waiver, usually bundled with it, means you can only bring a claim individually, not as part of a group with other affected customers. Both are standard in consumer SaaS for a reason: they meaningfully reduce a company's litigation exposure.
Why DocuAgree doesn't have one yet
Straight from Section 13 of our own Terms of Service: "Those are standard in US consumer SaaS and would meaningfully limit litigation exposure, but they carry real legal weight, real enforceability requirements that vary by jurisdiction, and a real tradeoff against user goodwill — the kind of thing that needs to be drafted (or at minimum reviewed line-by-line) by an attorney, not assembled from a template." Arbitration clause enforceability is genuinely jurisdiction-specific and easy to get wrong by copying language that worked somewhere else. For a pre-launch product, getting it wrong is worse than not having one yet.
What this means for you right now
If a dispute ever comes up, our Terms require 30 days of good-faith informal resolution first — reaching out and giving us a real chance to fix it directly. If that doesn't resolve it, the dispute goes to the state or federal courts where the company is governed, the same as it would with almost any company before arbitration clauses became standard.
The honest caveat
This isn't a permanent commitment framed as a feature — it's an accurate description of where things stand today, stated plainly instead of buried in boilerplate. If DocuAgree adds a properly drafted arbitration clause later, with real attorney review behind it, the Terms will say so, and this page will be updated to match rather than left contradicting them.