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Well, yes and no. As partners, we were and are both self-employed. We, and especially our clients, need to be vigilant about independent contractor status since there is a presumption of employment built into regulatory enforcement.
In our case, the best protection we've always offered our clients is having multiple clients at the same time. We have several other typical business practices that also stress our independent status, like logo and branding (including business casual logowear), operating our own office, and providing our own vehicles, equipment, and supplies. Most of our consulting agreements are drafted and signed on our letterhead, not the client's. Even in the rare circumstances when we have to sign a client's contract, we can still substantiate that the bulk of our practice is conducted using our agreement letters.
Particularly when we prepared grant applications (something we used to do all the time but stopped doing about a decade ago), we included agreement language on our letterhead guaranteeing rapid access to decision-making client representatives and the expectation that client representatives would cooperate with our work to assure deadlines were met.
Michael L. Wyland
Sumption & Wyland
818 South Hawthorne Avenue
Sioux Falls, South Dakota 57104-4537
(605) 336-0244
"I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend." - Thomas Jefferson to William Hamilton, April 22, 1800
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