Safeguarding Your Wedding Business: Legal Insights with Leah Weinberg

What if you could safeguard your wedding business against unexpected challenges and legal pitfalls? Join us on this eye-opening episode of Wedding Empires as we welcome the formidable Leah Weinberg, a former wedding planner who has seamlessly transitioned back into law to become a pivotal force in the wedding industry. 

Leah shares her unique journey, unveiling how she established Weinberg Legal amidst the COVID-19 pandemic to champion the needs of wedding and event professionals. 

Her background provides her with a rare perspective, enabling her to dispel common legal misconceptions and underline the necessity of clear, comprehensive contracts. Leah's insights are not just about preventing legal headaches; they are about empowering vendors to manage expectations and secure fair compensation for their hard work.

Throughout the episode, we dive into the critical importance of force majeure clauses and the ramifications of unforeseen events on weddings. Leah enlightens listeners on essential strategies to handle contract rescheduling or cancellations proactively. 

Our discussion also navigates the murky waters of legal blind spots, such as poor communication, which often lead to disputes. Leah stresses the significance of working with an attorney to build robust contracts and the risks of relying on generic templates. 

Delving into the nuances of passing credit card fees to clients, she highlights the legal variances across states. Ultimately, Leah's message is clear: investing in professional legal advice is not just prudent; it's a strategic move to future-proof your business.

Connect With Leah

Website: weinberglegal.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/leah-weinberg-50655a19

Chapters

• 0:28 Navigating Legalities in Wedding Planning
• 13:38 Navigating Legalities in Wedding Contracts

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:29

Welcome back to Wedding Empires. It is now season four, episode two, and I have with me the lovely Leah Weinberg. How are you, leah? Good? How are you today? I'm great. I'm so excited to meet you, because it's not often you get to spend time with a lawyer who also happens to have been a wedding planner.

Speaker 2: 0:52

Yes, I'm a rare unicorn in this world.

Speaker 1: 0:56

A unicorn that I'm very happy to spend time with because I have lots of questions, you know, just around sort of the legal things that we all need to know, and I guess how things have changed since COVID. It's certainly changed for me as a wedding planner, so we'll get into it in a second, but just by way of introduction. So Leah is the founder of Chroma Law. She is an attorney, a recovering wedding planner, as we've discussed, and she's also the author of the Wedding Rollercoaster. We'll talk about that too. After nearly a decade in the wedding industry as the owner of Colourpop Events, which was a New York City-based wedding planning company, leah is returning to her roots as an attorney to assist her former colleagues in the events industry, along with other entrepreneurs and business owners. A wedding pro educator with the Knot and WeddingWire. You might have seen her around, because Leah travels throughout the country and internationally sharing insights with her peers at conferences and organizations such as the Wedding MBA and a special event. So again, thank you for joining me, leah.

Speaker 2: 2:03

Yeah, thank you. Quick update for you. So I had to change the name of my new law firm. It's now Weinberg Legal instead of Chroma Law. So yes, it's a recent development, so surprise surprise everybody, was it for legal reasons? Yeah, legal technicality reasons, not because anybody else had the name, but different, yeah, state requirements and things like that.

Speaker 1: 2:26

Gotcha Okay, all right. So let's talk about the journey from wedding planner to attorney. What inspired you to return to law and specialize with wedding and event professionals?

Speaker 2: 2:39

Yeah, well, you were talking about how COVID sort of changed everything and that, honestly, is what accelerated my exit from being a wedding planner. So it was 2020. There were no weddings happening in New York at the time and a friend of mine had her own firm and I asked if she needed any help in terms of drafting contracts, sort of from a paralegal perspective, and so I started drafting contracts again for her, really enjoyed it, and then had a really bad wedding in 2021 and decided that's it and so finished out my weddings for 2022, but decided to go back to practicing law.

Speaker 2: 3:21

But you've got this unique insight? Obviously, yeah. I mean, I was a wedding planner for 10 years so I've seen every contract imaginable, but also I worked with every type of vendor and so I know their businesses, I know their pain points, I know how things run and how it works. So it gives me a really unique perspective when it comes to now representing those wedding professionals and business owners from a legal perspective.

Speaker 1: 3:49

Right, what do you think is the biggest sort of legal misconceptions that wedding vendors tend to have?

Speaker 2: 3:56

One of the biggest things that I hear that I always push back on is they're afraid that if they have a long client service agreement or if it's detailed and thorough and maybe a little formal and legalese, they think it's gonna scare clients away. I have a very long winded reason to answer that, but in short, I always tell people I was a wedding planner for 10 years. I had probably the scariest contract out there and not once somebody said, hey, we wanna work with you and then I sent them my contract. Did they ever say no, your contract is too scary, I'm not gonna sign it, I don't want to work with you anymore. And also, so far, that hasn't happened with any of my clients in the last two years either.

Speaker 1: 4:39

The only one I've got that had happened to me was that they didn't want their photos used. Yes, very common, that's a common one, I think.

Speaker 2: 4:46

Very, very common. Yeah, so people have comment. Yeah, People will always come back with comments and I always say that it's not a red flag and it's not an immediate red flag If people come back with comments to your contract. Sometimes it can be a red flag. We all know those people that just send you a completely redrafted contract. But there are things here and there that we'll see pretty frequently that clients come back with on contracts.

Speaker 1: 5:08

Okay, so let's talking about contracts. What are, in your opinion, the absolute must-have things to have in your contract?

Speaker 2: 5:15

as to what exactly it is that you do and you don't do. Number two from a legal contract perspective, it makes it clear what you're being paid for and then if you do something, or asked to do something out of scope, or agree to do something out of scope, make sure that you're gonna be compensated for that. So that's a really big one. And being able to just easily point back to your contract to say it when you get a request from a client, and then you can say hey, just so you know that's not included in my services, but if you'd like to add it on, it's whatever the additional fee is. It just makes it a much easier conversation to have when you can point back to your contract.

Speaker 1: 6:04

I agree and I think for us, with that point we adjusted our Clearly. I was a wedding planner before.

Speaker 1: 6:12

I had a business called darling, don't panic, and we we I love that we suffered through through covet and redid all of our contracts through covet and one thing that came up, you know, very quickly, was this additional work because we were moving the event and we were rebooking people and we were dealing on their behalf or whatever. That's a big one, you know, and and I think weddings can be so broad in term, you know, like full service wedding with one client can be, you know, a lot more hours than another full service wedding client over here.

Speaker 2: 6:48

So really spelling that out, yeah, and a friend of mine pointed out too, even in initial conversations. It can be helpful on those initial inquiry or sales calls. It can be helpful and I think this mostly applies from the planner context, because the range of services that planners provide can be so broad is to say to the client what do you expect from your wedding planner, or what do you expect from your photographer, your florist, your DJ? Let them answer that question so that if they have any kind of unrealistic expectations, you're able to take care of that from the very start, so kind of understand what they're thinking as well, just so that everybody gets on the same page.

Speaker 1: 7:30

And I think that's it's important to to establish that transparency with the client early on. You know I used to have in my first meeting that that you know I would sort of make this commitment that if something came up that was going to be over budget or over this, you know that we, we have this transparency where you know I will come to you about it in the first instance and we can discuss it. So it, you know, it sort of sets it up that that might, that might happen, absolutely Okay. So what are some of the lesser known but, I guess, highly valuable contract clauses that are often overlooked?

Speaker 2: 8:05

I think the intellectual property one is important and this comes up in different contexts depending on the type of vendor. With planners they're often creating timelines and floor plans and sometimes, you know, maybe mood boards they're providing vendor like preferred vendor lists, things like that. So those things need to remain the planner's property. We don't want clients being able to take those, give them to their friend, like give a sample timeline to a friend that's getting married, that kind of thing.

Speaker 2: 8:36

In the context of photographers, videographers, obviously the ownership of the copyright of the photos is really important. 99.999 times that's going to remain the photographer, that that right is going to remain with the photographer. The photographer and videographer will always own their images and they just give the client the right to use them in certain ways. For florists, you want to make sure those design decks and proposals and sketches and all of those things are protected. That way they're not taking your designs, giving them to somebody else to perhaps execute at a lower cost. So I think intellectual property is something that's really important but not always addressed in a contract.

Speaker 1: 9:17

Okay, and cancellations and rescheduling obviously hot topics, particularly since and during COVID. What's the best way for wedding pros to protect themselves but also be fair to clients?

Speaker 2: 9:33

yeah, the rescheduling. Obviously the the rescheduling is best for everybody. It's going to allow the vendor to keep the business, still perform the work still get paid in full. It's going to allow the client to still have their event, to really not lose any money, as you pointed out. I'm so happy you pointed this out. But in the context of a rescheduling it's important that your contract allows you to charge more for the extra work that's involved or if they've rescheduled and maybe your prices have gone up in the time period that they've rescheduled. So we want to kind of try to move everybody to a rescheduling resolution because I think that's best for everybody. So when we're talking about reschedulings, ideally I want to set an outside date so they can't go. You know, two, three years out. Most people are saying you have to reschedule within 12 months. If you reschedule all of the money gets moved, but again I'm able to charge additional money for the additional work involved or if I've raised my prices. And then people can decide. You know, do they have different policies If the rescheduling happens due to an act of God type event or if it's just a convenience factor.

Speaker 2: 10:48

The couple decides that they want to reschedule. You get to decide in your contract if you want to handle those situations the same way. When it comes to cancellations, I never want a vendor to be refunding money, so ideally your contract says that whenever they terminate, whatever has been paid up to that point you get to keep and then in certain situations, if they are canceling within a certain amount of time with it before the wedding date, you should be getting paid in full. You're a small business owner.

Speaker 2: 11:20

You have counted on this money For some folks. You've been booked for this for a year, 18 months in advance. You've been turning down work for this date. No matter the reason for the cancellation, you should be able to get paid at a certain point. The asterisk to that is that obviously there are very personal, very human situations that happen. If it's a death in the family, if maybe one of the people getting married falls ill, you might not feel comfortable keeping money or asking to get paid the balance in that situation and that's absolutely fine. But just, we want your contract to protect you the most and then give you that discretion to figure out how you want to handle a particular situation.

Speaker 1: 12:02

I found that really challenging with COVID as a wedding planner because of course there was so much work sort of already done. You know, yeah, and we we found ourselves trailing through emails and sort of proving what work we did and we certainly found better ways to protect ourselves around that in in, you know, crms and things like that we were able to really time, track and and demonstrate, um, but yeah, certainly we changed our contracts to sort of protect ourselves from that Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 12:32

And the conversation I'm encouraging wedding professionals to have with their clients is around insurance. So in the United States at least, people getting married can purchase event cancellation insurance. So if there is any kind of act of God, catastrophic event, anything that keeps them from getting married and they have to cancel, they can put in an insurance claim and get their money back. Wedding professionals can't in the US, can't similarly insure like that, and so the client can really protect themselves. And that's another reason why I advocate for just making sure your contract is favorable and protective of you as the vendor.

Speaker 1: 13:11

Now talking about sort of force majeure. Yes, yes, I know how to write it. So how do you think we should approach that in a contract? So you know, there's a flood, there's a tornado, there's, you know, something like that going on.

Speaker 2: 13:29

Yeah, I like to back up and kind of point out that there are force majeure can impact you in three. Honestly, there's three different situations that I think your contract needs to address. Force majeure, so the force majeure impact that it has on the wedding itself. It prevents the wedding from happening and that gets covered by the rescheduling and cancellation provisions that we've just talked about. But you also have to think about force majeure and how it can impact somebody during the wedding planning process. So let's say the couple has a death in the family and they just go radio silent and they ghost you for like two or three weeks.

Speaker 2: 14:05

In the contracts that I draft, ghosting for a certain period of time actually becomes an event of default and allows the vendor to terminate. If they have a client, that gets non-responsive. But for force majeure, if they're not responsive because there was a death in the family or some kind of medical or health condition, some kind of accident, then that's excused. So we kind of think about how force majeure impacts us as we are planning the wedding. And then the third context is a force majeure event that just impacts the vendor on the wedding day, so like if their car breaks down and they can't get to the wedding, or they wake up and they don't show up and you can't provide a substitute and you leave them high and dry without that vendor for the day.

Speaker 1: 15:02

I know it gives you.

Speaker 2: 15:04

I know, whenever I, whenever I'm going through, whenever I'm talking through that provision with my clients, I always preface it with. I know that you're going to move heaven and earth to find a replacement there for the day, but just in the event that it doesn't happen, we want to talk about what that your, that your liability is limited to refunding the money, and that's it. Because what we don't want is them saying, well, no, now you owe me two times the amount because you ruined my wedding day because of x, y and z. So we want to agree in advance what the consequences of that very rare situation is.

Speaker 1: 15:39

Right, okay. And what about payment schedules? Do you have advice around what you think they should look like?

Speaker 2: 15:46

I think it's a very personal decision. It's really about how you I mean it depends on the vendor category you are, how far out from a wedding you're typically booking somebody also quantity how many weddings you're doing. For me as a planner, I always did 50% upon contract signing, 50% upon about two weeks before the wedding, and that just worked in terms of my typical booking schedule and the volume I was doing. I know some folks maybe split it up into three or four payments. Here and there I see people do monthly payments. So it's really kind of up to you in terms of what works best for you from an accounting perspective.

Speaker 1: 16:30

Okay, what do you think is some of the most common legal blind spots that lead to disputes between wedding pros and clients?

Speaker 2: 16:39

Interesting. Honestly, it's not a legal blind spot, it's a practical blind spot and it is poor communication and poor responsiveness to communications. So that's where I see people getting tripped up the most is when they can't stay on top of their emails and they just aren't getting back to clients in a timely manner. Emails slip through the cracks, maybe they are like they miss a deadline or something like that.

Speaker 1: 17:10

I find that that just lack of communication and not being timely in responses is what really makes clients the most frustrated when it comes to working with their vendors yeah, okay, um, I was gonna say um, what is one legal mistake that you see wedding pros making all, all the time that that you think easily can be avoided?

Speaker 2: 17:39

it has to do with. Well, frankly, it's not working with an attorney on their contracts.

Speaker 1: 17:44

Um yes, going online or getting chat, gbt to write it.

Speaker 2: 17:49

oh please, don't have chat gbt. Write your contracts. Oh yeah, that gives me the the heebie-jeebies. Yeah, I have to acknowledge, not everybody's going to be able to afford to have an attorney do a custom contract for them. Some folks, when they're starting, may not even be able to afford a template that you can purchase. But please try your hardest to budget for that. It is such a priority. I mean you think about if you can invest that at the beginning or just as soon as possible. Every single client that signs after is going to be signing that better version of your contract, and so from like that point in time on, you are gonna be so much more protected and it's a really worthwhile investment.

Speaker 2: 18:36

But yeah, people cobble together they borrow a colleague's contract to start from Google, copy and paste from Google. They take advice from people and Facebook groups who aren't necessarily qualified to be giving that advice, and it runs the risk of a few things like you can end up with provisions that conflict in your contract and that leads to ambiguity, lack of clarity, and so then we don't really even know what to do. It can lead to things actually not being enforceable. So one of the really hot topics is do you?

Speaker 2: 19:09

From a practical perspective is do you pass along your credit card fees to your client or do you just eat that, like bake them into your price and kind of eat it? And so different states have different in the United States, different states have different laws as to number one whether you're allowed to pass along credit card fees to your clients. And if you are, some places have a specific way that it has to be worded, and so you might get late. You might copy and paste language from somebody in a group that says and if you pay by credit card, you'll have a 3% processing fee. If you do that, for example, in New York, that language is actually illegal. So you kind of you need to be working with an attorney in your state to know what is right for your state and what's enforceable in your state and what's not.

Speaker 1: 19:59

I definitely agree. We got one done with a lawyer, like, I think, during COVID. It was an expensive exercise but it was future-proofed. When I sold that business, you know, I considered that one of the assets. It was an incredible set of contracts and whatnot, so definitely worth doing Leah now. If wedding pros want to work with you, how do they do that?

Speaker 2: 20:24

Yes, so my new law firm is going to be set up so that we can serve wedding professionals in New York, new Jersey, georgia, florida, illinois, texas and California. And then if folks need intellectual help with intellectual property matters so registering a trademark, registering copyrights that is not limited by state. We can work with anybody nationwide. But if there are folks in those states who are listening and they're like you know what I could really use an update to my client service agreement or have other legal questions, they are welcome to reach out to me through my website or my email address is just leahweinberglegalcom, so I'm very easy to find.

Speaker 1: 21:07

Fantastic. Oh, it's been lovely spending this time with you and thank you for being so helpful with all your. You've obviously got a real fantastic niche going on there and a lot of knowledge from our perspective as well.

Speaker 2: 21:19

So, yeah, thank you so much for having me. We'll have to get you back soon, yes, please.

Speaker 1: 21:24

All right, Well enjoy.

Speaker 2: 21:25

What time is it there? We're wrapping up the day. It's about 4.30 in the afternoon.

Speaker 1: 21:30

Okay, all right. Well, enjoy the rest of your evening and we'll.