Confidential information is valuable because it’s confidential. That value is wrecked when a recipient of your confidential information discloses or uses it in a way that breaches your agreement. The fallout can’t be undone with an apology or a revised NDA, especially not if you wait. It may take hours, days, or weeks before your team discovers a breach. However, when you do, it’s important to take prompt action Read More
What to Do When Your Business Partner Breaches a Contract
Business partnerships thrive on trust and mutual obligation. When a partner breaks that trust, whether through inaction, unilateral decisions, or outright deception, the fallout can derail operations and jeopardize the company’s future. If your business partner isn’t holding up their end of the deal, the question isn’t whether to act, but how. What Constitutes a Breach of Contract? Contracts define obligations. Read More
Copyright Cease and Desist Letters Demand Immediate Action
As we have discussed in prior blogs, proprietary knowledge is frequently key in helping businesses distinguish their goods and services from those of their competitors. In that regard, copyright can be a powerful tool that can serve as a shield as much as a sword. Understanding it, and its uses and pitfalls, is therefore increasingly important in today’s competitive business environment, including when sending or Read More
Effective Management of Employee Complaints
Managing employee complaints effectively is essential to maintaining a healthy business environment. An effective employee complaint procedure can provide an employer with legal defenses in the event of a civil action and foster a positive workplace where employees feel they are heard and treated justly. Below we review the steps for handling employee complaints, including receipt of the employee’s complaint, the Read More
Fortifying Your Defense with Documentation
In a world where dispute is inevitable, an unassailable defense can often be the ultimate differentiator. To preemptively build a robust shield against potential litigation, professionals and business owners must embrace the arts of documentation and preservation. With the right document preservation strategies in place, your organization can pave the way for a compelling defense, safeguarding its integrity and Read More
Protecting Trade Secrets In A World Where It Seems There Are None
The proprietary innovations individuals and organizations create are essentially the “secret recipe” that contributes to their success. For this reason, trade secrets are treated as a type of intellectual property that refers to any confidential business information that provides a competitive advantage to a company and is protected under the law. Although the progression and ease of data transfer technology and even Read More
Tyger Tyger: Safeguarding Against Predatory Copyright Takedowns
Tyger tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? William Blake wrote these words while chewing on the conundrum that the hand that wrought the prey also wrought the predator. But he could have equally bent this thought to Congress, as it perhaps unwittingly spun prey and predator from the words of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 Read More
Investigating The Investor
Newspapers are filled with stories about unwary investors misled by duplicitous CEOs and corporate founders. But what is far less covered is the unreasonable or bad faith investor who peppers all levels of the organization with demands for information, who panics over every change in the marketplace or the business plan, who doesn’t trust management, who poisons fellow investors against the company, who tries to Read More
Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Six Tips for Effective Due Diligence
In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll created a topsy-turvy world peppered with riddles and puns. That world may feel familiar to anyone who has gone through the due diligence process, where opportunities for misunderstandings are rife. The goal, however, of due diligence is to demystify and clarify, which can best happen when the parties rely on process, structure and well-articulated expectations Read More
The Ghost of Transactions Past: How Successor Liability Can Haunt the Present and Future of Your Business
Running the numbers, modeling markets and demand, and planning growth and profitability are common exercises for any acquisition. But in the excited rush around making the next big purchase, businesses sometimes neglect the trail of sticky and costly problems that can tag along with a deal, frequently expressed in the form of successor liability. Understanding how liabilities can follow an asset through the door–or Read More
