This piece of advice is prompted by a discussion I had about renter's problems with one of the groups I work with this week:
The best time to read an agreement is before you sign it.
The second best time to read an agreement is when you've encountered a problem.
This came up because we were talking about leases, and a lot of the people who were having problems with their landlords, 1) Never read the lease to begin with, 2) Also did not read the lease after encountering an issue with their landlord.
Now this is not about scolding people with "You should read before you sign," because honestly we all know that, and we've all been there: Life is busy, contracts are long, and by the time you've gotten all the way to signing a lease, user agreement, etc., the logic is usually "Well I don't have any other options/I've gotten all the way here, so why spend time reading it? Not like I can argue with it." That's a fair way to feel. Most of us aren't lawyers anyway, so it's not like the average person would notice a piece in a contract that's actually legally unenforceable, etc.
HOWEVER. What I'm here to tell you is that these types of agreements, especially where they are written by entities that actually have lawyers to do it, are intentionally written to outlast your attention span. They are long on purpose. They are jargony on purpose. The point is to overcome your will to read up front and even after you're having problems, so you'll just give up or give in.
The hack to this is, since the contract is written to outlast a human attention span, reading and following every step of it may very well outlast the attention span of the other party even when they're the one who created it.
Personal example: I had an issue with a print-on-demand site this year over them suspending my account without reason. Here is the series of events:
My account was suspended, and the "reason" was a group of five possible reasons sent to me via email.
None of those reasons seemed to apply, so I appealed, following all the instructions in the appeal portal.
My appeal was rejected, still only narrowing down the "reason" to a list of three possible reasons that did not apply.
I read the user agreement (admittedly for the first time, at least in years). I determined that nothing I did violated the user agreement and hypothesized that I got caught in some kind of automatic spam filter because I was uploading works too quickly (which there are no guidelines about in the user agreement, terms or conditions, or community guidelines).
The user agreement outlined an arbitration process, the first step of which was mailing a written notice of dispute to the company's mailing office on the West Coast. The rest of the steps basically said if we couldn't resolve our dispute via mail or email, I had the right to escalate to a formal dispute with arbitration, and the company would have to send a representative to the state I live in for the arbitration hearing and pay for everything.
About three weeks after mailing the letter, my account was reinstated with an apology.
I followed THE FIRST STEP of their arbitration process, and they gave in pretty much immediately when for nearly a month prior, all I could get was "we're sorry, but your account is not eligible for reinstatement," without acknowledging anything I said or any questions I asked in my repeated attempts to contact them. Just starting the process, indicating that I read the agreement, was enough to get an international company to fold and acknowledge me. They didn't have the patience to go through and pay for arbitration over a mistakenly suspended account.
AND: Once I started posting about this saga on my public art social medias, I started getting messages from other people like "Hey, my account was also suspended for no reason, but I just gave up. What did you do?" Then I would tell them, and they'd still be unwilling to read and pursue things for themselves - they'd ask me what part of the agreement the arbitration process was, etc., and because I try to help out, I'd pick out the relevant pieces for them, but that also highlights my point:
Even when people knew that there was a solid chance that reading and following the dispute process in the user agreement would get them what they wanted, they were still looking for a faster way to get to the end result.
Corporations count on this. Rental companies count on this. If you don't read the agreement before signing, at least do yourself the solid of reading it when you have issues to see if you have any way to fight back. If you do, follow every step of the outlined process and see the issue through. You might win like I did just by outlasting the other party's patience and making them feel like it's really not worth fighting with you.
