This review first appeared in Legal Information Alert, December 2000. It is reprinted here with permission.

The rapidly changing Internet environment has given rise to new intellectual property and ownership concerns. This relentless change brings uncertainty as lawyers and their clients maneuver in the new environment. Drafting Internet Agreements addresses the need for contractual agreements to alleviate that uncertainty. Although some of the concepts incorporated into these form agreements are not new, the forms provide a rich vein of source material for crafting new documents. The book focuses on use of the Internet by companies in general, not just by dot-coms, and will aid lawyers providing services to these companies.

The authors are Connecticut-based lawyers who have collaborated on a number of Internet and technology-related publications, as well as giving presentations on intellectual property issues. The forms, modified for use in the book, are drawn from their own practice experience as well as from the Internet.

The book is clearly laid out and uses a consistent approach to each of the nearly forty-five documents, broken into seven content-focused chapters such as "Web Site Development" or "E-commerce". Each chapter begins with an overview describing the purpose of the subsequent forms. Preceding each form is an introduction to the form's particular purpose, a checklist of items the form covers, and practical tips that discuss the rationale behind the form's focus. The checklist and tips approach is especially useful in providing guidelines for a lawyer on what elements should remain in the agreement as it is being customized and why those elements are there.

The book is uniform in presentation and the binder indicates that there will be regular updates. The forms' language may require explication when being redrafted, where there is use of cumbersome terms, like customer customers. The frequent use of "boiler plate" clauses, for jurisdiction statements and the like, should make customization of the forms easy for a particular practice environment. Most of the forms are included on a CD-ROM in a readily accessible format for most word processors. Nearly one quarter of the forms included in the book, but that are included on the CD, are available for free from U.S. government Web sites.

Drafting Internet Agreements does not restrict itself to Internet-only agreements. The Web Site Linking Agreement is an excellent example of an Internet-only agreement and the rationale for using one. A few of the forms have only a tenuous connection to the Internet, an example being the Celebrity Endorsement Agreement. The contracts can be used by Internet companies, and their lawyers, but are applicable much more broadly. Their inclusion indicates the authors' attempts to provide a comprehensive resource.

The book is a good Internet forms compilation for academic, corporate, and private law firm libraries and is a reliable supplement to the sample Internet agreements published on law-related Web sites. Any organization needing a thorough collection of Internet agreements can benefit from this book.