I did my first three years of freelance work on email agreements and goodwill. It went fine until it did not, and the one that went wrong cost me about six weeks of unpaid work and a friendship.
What follows is the minimum I would now put in writing, built from things that have actually gone wrong rather than from a legal template. It is not legal advice and anything substantial deserves someone qualified.
What the deliverable is, precisely
The single largest source of dispute, and it is almost always about quantity rather than quality.
Specify the number of finished pieces, the duration of each, the format delivered, and the resolution.
Then specify what is not included. This is the part people omit and it is where the trouble lives. Additional cuts for other platforms, subtitles, versions in other languages, source files, raw footage.
Every one of those has been assumed to be included by a client at some point in my working life, and none of them were discussed beforehand.
Revisions, with a number
Two rounds of revisions included, further rounds charged at a stated rate.
Without a number, revisions are unbounded, and a client with no cost attached to asking will keep asking. This is not malice, it is the absence of a constraint.
Worth defining what a round is: one consolidated set of notes, delivered together. Otherwise a round becomes six emails over two weeks and the count is meaningless.
And worth stating that changes to what was agreed — a different structure, a different length, new material — are not revisions. They are new work.
Payment structure
Something up front, always. A third is common and any amount changes the dynamic.
The deposit is not primarily about cash flow. It is a signal of commitment, and projects that stall or evaporate are overwhelmingly the ones that never had one.
State when the balance is due — on delivery, or within a stated number of days — and what happens if it is late.
For anything long, stage payments against milestones. Being three months into a project with nothing received is a bad position and it is entirely avoidable.
Who owns what
Frequently unstated and occasionally important.
The default position varies by jurisdiction and by whether you are an employee or a contractor. Do not rely on the default, state it.
The arrangement I use is that the client receives the rights they need for the agreed use once payment is complete, and I retain ownership of the raw material and the right to show the work in my portfolio.
That last clause matters more than it sounds. A freelancer who cannot show their work has a serious problem getting the next job, and clients occasionally object to portfolio use after the fact.
The payment-completion condition is also worth having. Rights transferring on payment rather than on delivery gives you something to hold if the invoice is not paid.
The kill fee
What happens if the project is cancelled part way through, which happens for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
A stated proportion payable depending on the stage reached. Deposit retained if cancelled before shooting, half if cancelled after shooting, full if cancelled after delivery of a first cut.
The project that cost me six weeks was cancelled after the first cut, by a client who considered that they owed nothing because they were not using it. Without a clause, that was an argument rather than a fact.
Timeline, with dependencies
State delivery dates and state what they depend on.
Client feedback is the main dependency and it is routinely late. A delivery date that assumes notes within three days, when notes take three weeks, becomes your problem rather than theirs.
The wording that has worked for me is that delivery dates shift by the amount that feedback is delayed. Not a penalty, just a statement of arithmetic, and it prevents the compression of your schedule to absorb someone else's delay.
Keeping it short
Everything above fits on two pages in ordinary language. It does not need legal drafting for work of modest size and a plain agreement that both parties have read is worth more than a long document nobody opened.
For larger work, or anything where the rights have real commercial value, that changes and the money justifies the advice.
The conversation is the point
The thing I did not appreciate early is that the value is largely in having the discussion rather than in the enforceability.
Going through deliverables, revisions, payment and cancellation before starting surfaces every mismatched assumption while it is still cheap to fix.
Most of the disputes I have seen were not bad faith. They were two people who had different pictures in their heads and never compared them, and a single conversation would have prevented all of it.