In today’s digital marketplace, direct sellers rely heavily on electronic agreements to govern their relationships with customers, vendors, and partners. But whether these electronic agreements are enforceable depends, at least in part, on how your policies and other terms are presented to users and the way assent is obtained. Courts scrutinize these issues closely, emphasizing that even minor design choices can make the difference between a binding electronic agreement and an unenforceable set of terms.

As we’ve written previously, direct selling companies are facing a wave of lawsuits, primarily in California, claiming that distributors do not qualify as independent contractors and instead are misclassified employees. Just recently, however, a California court refused to certify a class on these claims—an important outcome for all direct sellers.