Legal Terms

1. Operator and contact

In these Legal Terms, “Operative”, “we”, “us” and “our” refer to the confirmed operator identified above. “You” means a person who visits the website, requests a resource or submits an enquiry.

2. What the website provides

The website describes commercial contract review and drafting, service-agreement and SOW preparation, contract-flow design and related legal or implementation services. It also provides short forms through which you may request a resource or ask Operative to consider a matter, and free contract tools described in section 7.

Website descriptions are general. They do not guarantee that a service is available, suitable for you, offered at a particular price or capable of being completed by a particular date. We may change the website, resources and service descriptions as the practice develops.

A website submission is a request for contact. It is not an acceptance of a mandate, a quotation, an engagement letter or a promise that Operative will act.

3. Enquiries and starting a matter

Until that written confirmation is given, neither the website nor any preliminary exchange obliges Operative to advise you, protect a deadline, preserve a right, take a procedural step or refrain from acting for another person.

You remain responsible for monitoring signing dates, court or regulatory deadlines, notice periods and other time-sensitive obligations unless responsibility for a specific deadline has been expressly accepted in writing.

4. Scope, fees, timing and delivery

Each accepted matter will be governed by its written engagement terms, scope or proposal. Those matter-specific terms should identify the responsible attorney, client, work, assumptions, exclusions, fees, taxes, dependencies, timing, communication route and acceptance or completion mechanics.

If these website terms conflict with signed matter-specific terms, the matter-specific terms control for that engagement. Website examples, package descriptions and indicative language do not expand an agreed scope.

Any estimate depends on the information, documents, counterparties, responsiveness and assumptions identified for the matter. A change in facts, instructions, urgency or scope may require revised timing and fees, which should be confirmed in writing before the additional work proceeds.

5. Confidentiality and information security

The website forms are deliberately short and marked as non-confidential. Do not upload documents or submit detailed legal advice, privileged material, trade secrets, personal identifiers or other sensitive information through them.

Information sent before an engagement is accepted may still need to be reviewed for conflicts and handled responsibly, but you should not assume that every pre-engagement communication is privileged or that Operative can protect your interests merely because information was sent.

Once a matter is accepted, confidentiality, legal professional privilege, information-security arrangements and document-sharing methods will be governed by applicable law, professional duties and the engagement terms.

6. Website content and outcomes

The website and any general resources are provided for commercial and educational context. They are not legal advice for your particular facts, transaction, counterparty or jurisdiction. Law and commercial practice change, and general material may not be complete or current for your situation.

No contract structure can promise signature, payment, enforceability, regulatory acceptance, dispute avoidance or a particular business or legal result. Professional services are provided with the care and skill required by applicable law and professional obligations, but outcomes also depend on facts and people outside Operative’s control.

Nothing on the website should be treated as an endorsement by a current or former employer, client, institution or organisation shown in biographical material.

7. Free contract tools

Operative offers free tools at tools.operative.law, such as Contract Batch. This section applies to them together with the rest of these Legal Terms.

• Your files stay on your device. A tool reads the files you load inside your browser and does not send them to Operative. The warning in section 5 against uploading documents applies to the website forms, not to a tool that reads files only in your browser.
• The output is a draft, not advice. A tool’s output, such as an addendum, notice or letter, is produced by fixed rules from the data you enter and the terms read from your files, using standard templates. No attorney has reviewed it for your matter. It is not legal advice, and using a tool does not create an attorney-client relationship.
• You check every contract. A tool may read a term wrongly or not at all. Before you use or send anything, check each value against the contract, including the parties, dates, notice period and notice address, and check the contract’s own requirements, such as non-variation, notice and signing formalities.
• Dates are calculations. End dates, notice deadlines and other dates are calculated from the data you entered or confirmed. By default a tool counts calendar days from the date of sending. Your contract may set a different rule, such as business days or deemed delivery. The calculations are not checked, and you remain responsible for every deadline, as section 3 states.
• You may use what you make. You may use, edit, copy, sign and send the documents a tool produces, and the templates within them, for your own business and in dealings with your counterparties. This permission applies despite section 8. It does not cover copying, reselling or publishing the tools themselves.
• “Copy for checking” and other services. A tool may let you copy contract details to your clipboard so that you can paste them, and attach the contract, in a service of your choice, such as an AI assistant. The tool sends nothing itself. What you share, and how that service handles it, is between you and that service, under your account and its terms. Operative has no part in it and accepts no responsibility for it. You must be entitled to share the contract and the personal information in it. An AI service’s answer can be wrong; accept a correction only where you have checked it against the contract.
• Other people’s information. You are responsible for the counterparty and personal information you load or enter, including under POPIA and any confidentiality obligation.
• Availability. The tools are free and provided as they are. They may change, be withdrawn or contain errors, and come with no promise that they are available, complete or accurate.

8. Acceptable use and intellectual property

You agree not to misuse the website, interfere with its operation, attempt unauthorised access, submit unlawful or harmful material, impersonate another person, scrape the site at unreasonable scale or use it to infringe another person’s rights.

Operative or its licensors own the website, brand, layout, original text, graphics, tools and resources, unless a page states otherwise. You may view and print website material for your own internal evaluation. You may not reproduce, resell, publish, sublicense or present it as your own work without written permission. Section 7 sets out what you may do with documents that a free tool produces.

Third-party names, marks and materials remain the property of their respective owners. Their appearance does not imply sponsorship or endorsement.

9. Third parties, liability, law and changes

The website may rely on hosting, database, email, font or linked services supplied by third parties. Their own terms and notices apply to services they operate. We are not responsible for a third-party site merely because the website links to it.

To the extent permitted by law, Operative is not liable for loss caused solely by reliance on general website content or on a free tool or its output (including terms it reads, dates it calculates and documents it drafts), by information you share with a third-party service, inability to access the website, unauthorised misuse of the website or a third-party service outside Operative’s reasonable control. Nothing in these Legal Terms excludes or limits liability, professional duties, consumer rights or other remedies that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

Liability arising from an accepted legal matter is governed by the applicable law, professional obligations and the written engagement terms, not by a broader statement on this website.

These Legal Terms are governed by South African law, subject to any mandatory law that applies to a visitor or matter. The courts of South Africa have jurisdiction over disputes about the website, subject to any mandatory jurisdictional rights. An accepted matter is governed by the law and forum stated in its engagement terms.

We may update these Legal Terms when the website, services or legal requirements change. The date at the top identifies the current version.