2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me. from SanFrancisco/CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

Definitely one of the most useful videos I’ve seen in a while. Having to deal with clients in a regular basis, I can’t deny there is a great deal of common sense in it.

In my personal case, I do not do any client work without a contract in place, ever. I found it helps streamline the communication and the collaboration with the client, removing uncertainty and concerns upstream, instead of downstream. So far I haven’t encountered any client who didn’t want to have a contract in place; most usually we go through several revisions, depending on their legal team’s requirements or some other detail that has to be reviewed. But I’ve had people not respecting them. That’s another problem altogether.

I admit, however, that my contract model is far from perfect. And that’s where this video comes in handy. In particular, the “intellectual property transfer on last payment” part is the most interesting one for me; I’ve had payment problems in the past, even after an application was published on the app store, and I positively know that I do not want such problems in the future.