Calling someone a contractor does not make them one, and sending a 1099 does not either. What they actually are is what decides who owns the work they build for you. BKK Roundtable is a video series from Bean, Kinney & Korman where attorneys from different practices work the same problem at one table. One set of facts, handed from practice to practice, so you can see exactly where the answers diverge. Six months in, the work is overflowing and the two owners are ready to bring somebody on. Bean, Kinney & Korman attorney Jennifer O. Schiffer sets the problem out, and Maureen E. Carr and Evan St. John take it from there. Maureen starts with the question founders think they get to answer themselves: employee or independent contractor. She explains why the label on the invoice does not settle it, why a 1099 and even a signed independent contractor agreement do not either, and what actually gets looked at instead, which is control over how, when and where the work is done. Her advice when the answer is unclear is to make the person an employee, because the trouble comes from the other direction. Evan then takes who owns what that person creates. For an employee using company resources on work the employer assigned, the copyright usually belongs to the employer, though he explains why work for hire is narrower than founders assume, especially for software and other work the statute never anticipated. Maureen asks him whether the answer changes if the same person had been engaged as a contractor instead. It changes drastically: with no agreement in place, the work is presumptively the contractor's, and they can register it without the company's knowledge or consent. Both halves end at the same fix, which is to put ownership in the document at the front end. “If you hire someone as an independent contractor and say you just sort of forgot to have the party sign an agreement at all, all of that work is presumptively the work of the independent contractor.”