At Sirius Legal, we have a long tradition of partnerships with professional federations in technology and communication related sectors. We were therefore very honoured and enthusiastic when technology federation Agoria asked us a while ago if we would like to become the exclusive legal partner of their new sector federation for IT consultants Techlancers, which was launched last week.

Freelancing as a new model

Freelance has the wind in its sails. More and more professionals in Belgium and beyond are choosing not to be permanently employed by an employer, but to share their knowledge and experience on a freelance basis with one or more clients. According to Unizo, Belgian’s federation for small enterprises and independant workers, there were in 2020 over 291,000 freelancers in Belgium. About twelve percent of them have a specific IT profile.

Techlancers

Until now, those tech freelancers did not really have their own sector federation to represent their interests. That is why Agoria, the federation of Belgian technology companies,, decided to set up a separate professional federation for IT consultants under the name Techlancers. Techlancers will focus primarily  on consultants with an IT profile and engineers and wants to assist them with networking, knowledge sharing and training. Agoria wants to unite five thousand of these freelancers within Techlancers by 2025. 

Sirius Legal

Freelancers can not only expand their knowledge and network at Techlancers, they will also find tools (such as model contracts and checklists), benefits and partnership deals. To offer these services, Agoria chose a select list of renowned partners such as Belfius bank, NextConomy, SBB accountants, Volvo and ODB.

We are therefore very proud at Sirius Legal to be able to add our name to that list as the exclusive legal partner of Techlancers. In the coming years Sirius Legal will assist the members of Techlancers with model contracts, checklists, education and training and with some fixed fee services such as quick contract reviews for consultants who want to enter into a new agreement with a client.

At Sirius Legal, this collaboration follows in a line of partnerships that we are very proud of, including the Federation of Web Professionals Feweb, The Belgian Association for Marketing BAM, The United Brands Associations UBA (all major advertisers in the country), SafeShops. be in e-commerce , The Dutch Chamber of Commerce for Belgium and Luxembourg NKVK, Eventplanner.be and FedEvent in the event sector…

What we want to do

We hope to be able to contribute a little bit to the success of freelancing in  Belgium by offering help and advice. After all, being an independent consultant is not always easy. Freelancers are often on their own and just finding and securing the next assignment on time can be a serious challenge. For those who do manage to get hold of that next great assignment, the next stumbling block is often negotiating a fair and balanced contract. Not easy, after all, freelancers are not lawyers. There are countless templates and sample contracts to be found online, but the reality is that there is also a lot of questionable content on the internet and without the necessary basic knowledge it is very difficult to decide what is or is not a good contract. We want to offer freelancers the necessary support there with very practical tips for their contracts as a freelance consultant.  

As a first step, we have already planned a first workshop with tips on topics such as non-compete clauses during and after an assignment, intellectual property on created content, getting paid (on time), termination of consultancy agreements in various contexts, the independent statute of freelancers and the phenomenon of false self-employment, the use of general terms and conditions, … We will explain what is and is not allowed, what is common in comparable contracts and what different options there are to find an acceptable compromise that both the consultant and the client can agree with.   

Register for this event can be done on Techlancers.be.

Want to know more about technology contracts or freelancing?

Feel free to call or email Bart Van den Brande on +32 486 901 931 or at [email protected] or schedule a no-obligation meeting directly in Bart’s agenda.