SaaS, Platforms, & Cloud Services

Software and platform businesses operate on layered contracts whose risk often isn’t obvious until a dispute arises. Beyond standard customer SaaS agreements, there are enterprise deals with negotiated terms, platform and marketplace agreements, API licenses, data-sharing arrangements, reseller and integration partners, and a growing stack of cloud vendors whose terms can change with little notice. Many of these agreements directly affect revenue recognition, uptime commitments, data rights, and liability exposure, and small drafting decisions can have outsized consequences as the business scales. In SaaS agreements, there are often friction points involving data — how it may be used, who owns it, how “anonymized” or aggregated data is defined, which party bears the responsibility for compliance with the GDPR and other data privacy laws, and even which party’s data processing terms to use. You need an attorney who knows how to advise businesses on these issues and can identify true risk, distinguish deal breakers from acceptable tradeoffs, and provide practical guidance on data privacy, IP, vendor management, marketing, and cloud spend.

I’m Rick Mortensen, and I can help. As an in-house lawyer, I’ve drafted SaaS agreement templates designed to be used across multiple products, customers, and jurisdictions. At a mining services company, I created a standardized SaaS agreement for international use that covered several software products with different functions, ranging from worksite management to geological analysis. The agreement allowed for our software products to be used together simultaneously, and it cleanly integrated with the company’s services agreements and EULA. At an accounting firm, I drafted the customer agreement governing access to the company’s proprietary suite of software applications, which provided industry-specific SaaS tools to its clients using NetSuite. I also reviewed, revised, and negotiated several reseller arrangements for that same firm, allowing it to resell a full array of accounting software from other providers. More broadly, I’ve worked inside companies whose core products were delivered through software platforms, where subscription access, dashboards, and user permissions were central to the business model. I’ve drafted and negotiated API and integration agreements, including licenses that controlled access, limited data use, and prevented scraping or misuse. Across these roles, my focus has been on aligning contract terms with how the software and platforms actually operate, which allows me to eschew unnecessary verbiage and focus on what is really important to the business.

Call or email, and let me know how I can help with your SaaS, platforms, or cloud services.