As the year ends with holiday joy and time with loved ones, reviewing your estate plan and making tax-free gifts may not be at the top of your mind. However, it's the perfect time to ensure your estate is in order and to use the annual gift-tax exemption before it's gone. Estate Planning An estate plan ensures your assets are [...]
This year we are truly thankful for our incredible staff who have worked diligently to serve our clients’ needs. While we are still facing many difficulties, we are hopeful that the future will be brighter. The celebration of Thanksgiving by this nation is deeply rooted in our history. President George Washington proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving Day on October 3, [...]
Trademark-Registry Impersonators We frequently get questions from our clients about “important notifications” from companies offering to monitor, register, or renew their trademarks. The scam requests typically look like invoices or letters, often containing false due dates or threats about loss of rights if you don’t send payment immediately. These scams can be hard to identify because scammers often use names [...]
When you have a dispute with someone, your first thought may be, “I’ll sue that $#@*&^%!” but this may not be the best option. Litigation is a stressful, time-consuming, slow, and expensive way to resolve a dispute. This means that settling a dispute is often preferable to resolving the matter through litigation. It’s faster and cheaper, and no matter how [...]
When used in connection with a product or service, any name, symbol, logo, or combination of these items may be protected as a trademark. The purpose of a trademark is to identify the source of a product or service. Trademark laws are designed to protect consumers rather than trademark owners, so the test for infringement is whether the marks at [...]
When reading documents from your lawyer, you may find a number of legal terms that you don't recognize. Some of the legal terms you're most likely to encounter when involved in a legal dispute are: Mediation, Arbitration, and Trial Mediation is an attempt to settle a legal dispute with the help of an impartial mediator (or referee), who tries to [...]
Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind. Examples include artwork, computer software, novels, logos, music, and technological inventions. Although it’s intangible, IP is often more valuable for a business than its tangible assets, such as equipment and inventory. Nearly every business has some form of IP. Trade Secrets The Uniform Trade Secrets Act, which has been adopted by [...]
Ideas for Workplace Accommodations The US Department of Labor (DOL) has a new tool, the Situations and Solutions Finder, that provides access to more than 700 accommodation ideas for workers with disabilities and their employers. The DOL’s Office of Disability Employment Policy provides public access examples of workplace accommodations shared by customers of the Job Accommodation Network (JAN). The database [...]
Have you conducted an intellectual property (IP) audit in the last year? If not, now is the time to get started. IP includes copyrights, trademarks, trade dress, patents, trade secrets and the like. In fact, it's called intellectual property since it involves products of the mind. An IP audit involves a systematic review of all IP you own, control, or [...]
Copying someone else’s work isn’t always a copyright infringement. Although the law is significantly more complex than this, generally speaking, copying is infringing only if the copied parts are protected by copyright and if the two works are “substantially similar.” In addition, even if the copied parts are protected and the works are substantially similar, the new works might not [...]
