The contract, in plain English.
Month to month. Your firm owns everything from day one. Leave with thirty days notice and walk out with every asset, every data point, every account.
Your firm owns it. You leave when you want.
Website, code, content, ad accounts, analytics. All in your firm’s name from day one.
Thirty days notice. We hand off everything and brief your next agency. No fees.
Three things need to be in your name.
Most agencies say “you own your content.” Few put it in the contract this directly. Every deliverable is work for hire; copyright transfers on delivery, title transfers on payment.
Code and content
Every blog post, practice area page, attorney bio, landing page, and ad creative is yours outright. Republish, hand to a new agency, print it. No permission needed for what you already own.
Platform accounts
Google Ads, Analytics, Business Profile, and every third party tool in the firm’s name with the firm as owner. We hold manager access you can revoke any time.
Domain and hosting
Registrar account in the firm’s name. Hosting billed to the firm. If we vanish tomorrow, nothing breaks.
Three years of SEO content, conversion data, and audience intelligence has real balance sheet value. On rented infrastructure, that equity isn’t yours. You’re paying rent on assets you built.
The full data set. Not summaries.
“You own your data” sounds good until you ask for it and get a PDF report. The portability clause closes that gap. Your firm is named Data Controller; Argota is named Data Processor. Same language as CCPA and GDPR.
The firm. Final say over how data is stored, used, and moved.
Argota. We hold and operate the data. The firm decides what happens to it.
What you get in the export
- Lead records
- Every form, call, chat. Tagged to campaign, ad group, keyword.
- Call recordings
- Audio + timestamp + landing page the caller was on.
- Conversion events
- Each conversion tagged to the keyword that fired it.
- Audience segments
- Lookalikes, retargeting pools, exclusion lists.
- Database backups
- SQL dumps any developer can restore on any host.
The exit should be boring.
Bad exits aren’t the ones where the firm fires the agency. They’re the ones where nobody documented the handoff and momentum disappears for six weeks. Five steps, written into the contract.
Confirm the firm has domain credentials. It was always yours.
Payment shifts to the firm’s card if it wasn’t already.
Leads, calls, conversions, audiences, database. Inside thirty days.
Once the new agency has access, we step out. No leftover credentials.
Call with the incoming provider. Saves them weeks of reverse engineering.
Survival clause. Privacy and ownership rights outlive the contract. We can’t use your firm’s data, content, or strategy after the work stops. Otherwise nothing stops an old agency from carrying what they learned about your market to a competitor.
A locked deal is a debt. Rolling is a cost.
Other agency owners ask how this doesn’t kill the business. Honest answer: when clients can leave any time, the only thing keeping them is results. That’s the whole model.
What managing partners care about
Balance sheet
A locked deal is a debt. A rolling cost flexes when cash gets tight, when a partner leaves, when a merger changes the plan.
Due diligence
Long term vendor contracts are problems during M&A. Month to month gets continued or cut on day one.
Cash flow
You pay for what’s delivered each month. If the work stops working, the firm stops paying.
More on this in multi office marketing budgets and how to size your spend.
Three questions that surface the truth fastest.
Applies to us and to every other agency on your list. The full vetting process is 15 questions. These three do the most work.
The right answer is: everything. Domain, site, code, content, data, analytics history. If the answer involves “you keep the content but the platform stays with us,” the business model needs your departure to be expensive.
Not who manages them. Who owns them. If the agency created a master Google Analytics account and your data lives inside their property, you’re a tenant. When you leave, the history stays with the landlord.
If there’s no documented offboarding, the exit will be improvised. Improvised exits are where firms lose rankings, lose data, and lose two months while the new provider reconstructs what the old one built.
If a question gets a vague answer, that’s the answer. Specificity is the only proof here.
Jorge Argota · 10 years legal marketingQuestions before the call
What are Argota’s contract terms?
Month to month. No termination penalties. Firm owns every digital asset from day one: website code, content, ad accounts, analytics, lead records. Thirty day export window after termination is contractually guaranteed. Argota is Data Processor; the firm is Data Controller, aligned with CCPA and GDPR.
Is there a long term contract?
No. Thirty days written notice to terminate. No minimum term, no early termination fees, no setup recoupment, no asset release charges. The firm pays for services rendered through the notice period.
Who owns the website and accounts?
The firm. All deliverables are work for hire, so copyright transfers on delivery. WordPress install, code, content, database, Google Ads, Analytics, Business Profile, every third party platform sit in the firm’s name. We hold manager access the firm can revoke any time.
What data do I get when the contract ends?
The full set, delivered inside thirty days. Lead records with source attribution. Call recordings with timestamp and landing page. Conversion events with the keyword that triggered them. Every audience segment built in the ad accounts. Full database backups.
Why month to month when most agencies require annual?
When clients can leave any time, the only thing keeping them is results. That forces the work to produce outcomes every month, not just keep a contract alive. Locked contracts make sense for agencies that need to amortize underperforming clients.
The standard agreement, nothing redacted.
Read it with your attorney. If the terms don’t match what this page describes, don’t hire us. The contract is the proof.