The Contracts Looked Fine. They Weren't.

When you're building a product, contracts with your developers feel like a formality. You agree on the scope, the rate, the timeline — and you get to work. That's how we operated at GoMotion for a long time. Our developers were engaged under service agreements, which seemed straightforward and flexible. Nobody flagged a problem.

Documan did.

We hadn't come to them with a crisis. We were looking for legal and accounting support as the company grew, and during the initial review of our documentation they raised something I hadn't considered seriously before. Our service agreements with developers contained no intellectual property clauses. Everything those developers built — the product we were building our entire business on — could be legally disputed as not belonging to us. A service agreement, unlike an employment contract, does not automatically transfer IP to the company. Without an explicit clause, ownership is ambiguous at best.

There was a second issue. Several of our developers had worked across competing projects during their time with us. Our contracts had no non-compete provisions. We had no formal protection.

I hadn't thought of these as urgent problems because nothing had gone wrong yet. Documan explained clearly why waiting for something to go wrong was the wrong strategy.

We restructured all the agreements. IP assignment clauses were added, properly drafted to cover all work product created under the engagement. Non-compete provisions were introduced where relevant. The distinction between a labour contract and a service agreement was explained to me in terms I could actually apply — not just legally, but operationally, so I understood what each type of engagement meant for our rights going forward.

GoMotion's contracts now reflect what we always assumed they meant. Documan has been our legal and accounting partner ever since.

— Suren Hakobyan