A working group from the Committee on the Law of Cyberspace of the Business Law Section of the American Bar Association recently issued "Click-Through Agreements: Strategies for Avoiding Disputes on the Validity of Assent." This document is the culmination of the working group's efforts to craft a set of "strategies" for maximizing the enforceability of so-called click-through agreements. The working group appears to have settled on six fundamental guidelines: (1) give users an opportunity to review all terms and subsequent opportunities to review them again; (2) ensure the clear display of terms; (3) provide for assent to terms; (4) give users an opportunity to correct errors; (5) provide for users to reject terms and inform them of the consequences of rejection, (6) keep records to prove users' assent.
"These strategies are clearly consistent with the growing body of case law on click-through agreements," says Nathaniel Chapin, an attorney with Hughes & Luce's Outsourcing & Technology Section, "and complying with them will reduce uncertainty for everyone who does business on-line."
The project of the Cyberspace Law Committee working group will be published this November in Business Lawyer, the magazine of the ABA Business Law Section.
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