A while back, someone signed up for ClickFunnels and paid the first month with a prepaid debit card. Nothing unusual there. The next month rolled around, the prepaid card did not have enough left on it, and the charge declined. So the system did exactly what every billing system does: it sent a friendly automatic email that said, hey, update your card so you don't lose access.

Within minutes of that email going out, ClickFunnels received a demand letter. Eighty thousand dollars, or we sue. The claim was that this person was on a do-not-email list, so that routine little reminder had supposedly broken the law.

Russell Brunson has told this story from the stage, so I am comfortable sharing it. Here is how it ended: dismissed, zero settlement, zero payout. And the reason it ended that way was not luck. It was the quiet row of legal links at the bottom of the website. Their Terms of Service followed all of the very complex rules the right way, and that shield held.

The part of your website you never think about

Look at the bottom of any serious website. Amazon, Google, Apple, ClickFunnels: every one of them has that same quiet row of links. Terms of Service. Privacy Policy. Disclaimer. Most business owners treat it as decoration, something the web designer threw in.

It is not decoration. Every one of those links is either a contract or a legal notice. Your Terms are the rules a visitor agrees to just by using your site. Your Privacy Policy tells people what you collect and what you do with it. Your disclaimers limit what you are actually promising. Together, they decide what a visitor agreed to, what you owe them, and what you do not.

And here is the part that catches people. When those documents are missing, that is not a clean, neutral look. To the wrong person, an empty footer reads like an unlocked door.

The predator's-eye view

I want you to look at your own website the way a bad actor looks at it, because there is an entire industry built on this.

In 2025, there were over 5,100 federal website-accessibility lawsuits, and about 70% of them were aimed at retailers doing under $25 million a year. Just 33 plaintiffs filed nearly 2,000 of those cases. One single person filed 287. This is a volume business: an automated scanner crawls your site, finds a weakness, a template complaint gets filed, and most of these settle in 60 to 90 days for ten to twenty-five thousand dollars just to make them go away. On top of the lawsuits, somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000 demand letters went out.

The people running these plays are not reading your beautiful sales copy. They are reading the edges of your site. And the edges are exactly what most owners leave undefended.

The dollars are real, too. On the earnings-claims side, the FTC has brought cases like Raging Bull at $137 million, Lurn at $65 million, and DK Automation at $52 million, all built on income and results claims that were not properly disclosed. On the privacy side, Sephora paid $1.2 million under California's privacy law because their policy did not tell people they were, in the legal sense, selling data. California even gave them a 30-day window to fix it, and they let it lapse.

Where the footer sits on your protection map

If you have followed our work, you already carry a protection map in your head. Layer one is your entity, your LLC or your LLLP, the wall between the business and your personal world. Layer two is your contracts, your client agreements and engagement letters. Layer three, the one almost nobody talks about, is your website documentation. That is the outer wall, the layer the public actually touches every single day.

It is much like a physical storefront. Before anyone walks in, they see your posted hours, your return policy on the wall, and the little camera in the corner. Those things set expectations and rules before a word is exchanged. Your footer does the same job online, quietly, on every visit.

Why you cannot just copy someone else's

The natural temptation is to find a site you like, grab their Terms and their Privacy Policy, and paste them in. Please do not do that, because a borrowed footer can be worse than none at all. A copied footer carries the wrong entity name, the wrong state, and promises you never meant to make. It usually has no real assent mechanism, which is where a lot of these fall apart. Same kind of document as the one that saved ClickFunnels, opposite outcome, decided entirely by how it was built. A borrowed shield is cut to somebody else's shape. It does not fit you.

What to do this week

Open your live website on your phone or your laptop and scroll to the footer. Then ask a few honest questions. Do you have a Terms of Service, a Privacy Policy, and real disclaimers? Do they name your correct legal entity and state? Are they actually yours, or copied from somewhere else? If you show any income or results anywhere on the site, is there an earnings disclaimer near it? Does your privacy policy speak to data and opt-outs?

If you just found gaps, do not panic. This is a fixable afternoon, not a crisis. Inventory what you have live, match each document to your real entity and offers, replace the missing or borrowed pieces with documents built for you, and confirm the assent mechanics so they actually bind.

We are going deeper on all of this at our July Inner Circle training, "The Footer That Saved $80,000," on Wednesday, July 15. Bring your website pulled up, and we will run the audit together.

Keep Moving Forward.