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Posts Tagged ‘client’

Getting a Patent For Your Idea or Invention

03 Jan

A client came to me today wanting to know if I could represent him to obtain a patent for an idea he had. He said that he contacted a patent attorney, the only one in the phone book, and he wanted $9,000.00 for representation. I had to tell him that I could not represent him in the matter. Patent law is considered a very specialized practice in the legal profession. Most patent lawyers have a scientific and/or engineering background and even passed a special bar exam in addition to the one all other attorneys passed. Their specialized skills and expertise command high fees.

Consistent with the recuring theme of this site, you can file for a patent without an attorney. You will have to spend a lot of time doing the research and drafting the necessary documents, but it can be done.

Before embarking on the acquisition of a patent, make sure your idea or invention is one that is patentable. You must have a unique idea that is not yet for sale or known about. This means you have to research the idea to insure it is original.

Furthermore, you must be able to describe all aspects of your invention. A simple idea is not patentable. For example, I think we should all have affordable flying cars and robot maids. However, I don’t have any knowledge of how to put these ideas into place, so I could not obtain a patent. You should have well crafted designs and ideally, you should make prototypes showing that your idea actually works.

Consider the economic viability of your invention. Weigh the likely market for your product, the cost of production, and determine if it is likely to be profitable. If not, it is not worth the costs of obtaining a patent.

Once you’ve determined that a patent is right for you, you can obtain a provisional patent for a fraction of the cost and effort that the regular patent will cost. This will allow you patent pending status for one year. During this time, you can start marketing your product to test the waters. You may then file for a regular patent.

This article was based on a real question somebody had. If you have a question about a legal matter that you’d like answered, please do not hesitate to contact FreeForLaw.com. Also, if you’d like to purchase a product, such as a book from Nolo, and you find the information on FreeForLaw.com helpful, please link from this site to help pay to keep this site up and running. Here are some publications you might find helpful:







 
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The Unbundling of Legal Services

04 Oct

What can you do if you have a legal issue for which you cannot afford to retain a lawyer (but you do have some money) or you feel the issue is simple enough for you to handle on your own, but you need a little guidance? Perhaps you would like to use a lawyer for certain parts of your case such as:

  • To provide advice, information about the law, procedures to follow;
  • Completing crucial forms;
  • Review forms you prepared;
  • Conducting legal research; or
  • Representation at critical court hearings (perhaps you want to represent yourself to reach a settlement but want a lawyer in case the case goes to trial).

A lawyer providing limited representation for a client must follow Rule 1.2 division (c) of the Ohio Rules of Professional Conduct which states:

“A lawyer may limit the scope of a new or existing representation if the limitation is reasonable under the circumstances and communicated to the client, preferably in writing.”

So as long as the limited representation is reasonable under the circumstances and preferably in writing, then it is allowable. However, many lawyers are still reluctant to enter into such agreements. Some find it difficult to communicate the limitations and fear misunderstandings with the client. Some are busy enough representing clients on a full-time basis that they don’t need to engage in limited representation. Others are just traditionalists and historically, this was not how legal services were rendered. Some attorneys will provide limited representation as long as it does not involve appearing in court. It is difficult to start handling a matter without knowing what previously happened in court. Also, once an attorney makes an appearance in court, the court must approve a subsequent withdrawal.

This should not stop you from inquiring about a limited representation arrangement if you feel it is right for you in your situation. This site’s administrator, Jason Kasunick, is an Ohio attorney who does engage in limited representation arrangements under the right circumstances. Please feel free to contact him at (216) 245-7375 or through the email form on the Contact Us page to learn more.

 
 

What Lawyers Can Learn From LegalZoom

30 Sep

Unless you’ve been asleep for the last five years, you have probably heard of LegalZoom, the California-based, non-lawyer legal document preparation company that claims it has delivered over 1,000,000 wills to consumers, and that it is the largest incorporation company in the country.

LegalZoom is only one of hundreds of Internet-based legal form web sites that have emerged during the last 10 years and which are eating away at the market share of solos and small law firms. LegalZoom has been challenged by some state bars with the unauthorized practice of law, but hasn’t lost a case yet. They are serving thousands of customers who ordinarily would be served by solos and small law firms. They must be doing something that is in demand because they continue to grow at the expense of solos and small law firms.

LegalZoom, and non-lawyer legal form web sites like it, have a business model that consists of the following elements:

  • A legal service delivered purely over the Internet;
  • No physical offices, and thus no extensive rental costs to pass on to customers;
  • Limited services offered at a fixed price that can be easily compared with other providers including law firms;
  • The use of web-enabled document automation technology to reduce costs and increase productivity;
  • A secure customer portal where clients can execute legal tasks in their own personalized web space;
  • Access on their web site to thousands of pages of free legal information on hundreds of subjects;
  • Money-back guarantees to comfort consumers; and
  • Reliance on informed consumers to do part of the work, often called co-production, such as filing their own documents or executing their documents on their own based on provided instructions to keep costs down.

Consumers don’t seem to care that they are not dealing with a law firm. As lawyers, we know the service they are selling is risky for consumers, but for consumers it delivers a “good enough” result. LegalZoom would not be growing at this fast a rate if they weren’t offering something that consumers want and value.

How to Compete Against Legal Zoom and Other Non-Lawyer Providers

In the new, competitive environment that solos and small law firms face in the current economy, the keys to law firm survival are to expand the strategic options available by opening new client markets, reducing the cost of services, and delivering legal services in a way that distinguishes your firm from other firms in the pack. These strategic options should be mixed with more traditional approaches to differentiation such as specialization within a niche practice area.

It is time for solos and small law firms that offer personal legal services to the broad middle class to rethink their law firm business models. There are many opportunities for incorporating some of the elements of the LegalZoom business model into a more traditional law practice.

To name a few:

  • Consider offering "unbundled" limited legal services at a fixed price, both on-line and off-line;
  • Leverage a reputation in your local community and a physical office into an on-line brand that is both local to your community and extends throughout your state;
  • Add virtual law office functionality to your web site so that your clients can have the option of interacting with you on-line;
  • Figure out ways of using Internet-based technologies, such as web-enabled document automation to strip out costs from your overhead structure increasing profitability;
  • Figure out how to segment the market offering lower priced services for more routine matters in order to build trust so that when a client has amore complex problems they will turn to you for assistance;
  • Emphasize all of the advantages of using an attorney over a non-lawyer forms provider in your marketing materials and your elevator speech. Click here to see one such comparison.
  • Use web-based technologies to respond to both prospects and clients within hours rather than days.
  • Reduce the perceived risk that consumers have in retaining a lawyer by increasing transparency and structuring forms of performance guarantees.
  • Adopt project management technologies to better estimate costs and fees on more complex projects, translating that data into communications that clients understand.

The current depressed economy and its affect on the broad middle class is not going to change tomorrow. It is likely that solos and small law firms, will have to adjust to new pricing and market realities in the future as competition from non-lawyer providers of legal solutions continues to increase. Large law firms serving large corporations may be immune from these developments, at least for a few years any way, but the fact that Big Law is changing relatively slowly should not mask the rapid changes happening to solos and small law firm practitioners that serve consumers and small business.

I heard a report the other day that the volume of wills and estates practice in one state declined by 50% during the past year. I predict that this trend will continue and not reverse itself, despite any improvements in the economy.

Some commentators think that the monopoly will hold. History and the experience of other countries in deregulating the legal profession suggests otherwise.

Welcome to the "new normal."
 

 

AM I ANTI-SEMITIC?

15 Sep

August 11, 2006

People have often asked me this question.  They say "Look what the Jews did to you, Judge Arnold Gold put you in prison the day before you had to appear in court to start defending in your case, then kicked you out of your house to sell it and pay for the fees of opposing counsel (who sued you in the first place) who were 1. your wife’s killer attorney Emily Shappell Edelman, whose killer tactics no doubt helped kill her client, who is Jewish, and 2. Nicolette Hannah’s killer attorney, James R. Eliaser, whose killer tactics deprived a small boy of his father, who is Jewish – who I discovered the concealed fact that he used to be an employee of the judge’s law firm. By ordering these attorney’s wishes, the judge effectively created the loss of my small son to me and me to him, and the exodus of the entire Clark family, less me, to the East Coast, and the fracture of the Redgrave brand.

Then there was Family Court Supervising Judge Aviva Bobb, who I believe is Jewish, who backed Gold up, kept awarding new fees to Eliaser, and then refused to let me buy my guest house so that I could continue to live in Topanga, keep my dogs, and not store my belongings and not live in a trailer. Just a reminder here of my expectations that celebrity pandering could not happen in Hollywood’s hallowed halls of justice since we read this on their mission statement.

An Appeal to the Second Circuit got me a negative review from Justice Miriam Vogel, also Jewish.

An Appeal to the Supreme Court, after I had written to Chief Justice Ronald George, who I believe is also Jewish, was turned down.

And the media, which wouldn’t stop, appeared to get more fodder from the site of Hebrew University, where one of their professors made me the anecdotal target setting out to prove her totally inapposite use of me in a legal paper.  Her name was Hila Keren, and to this day, I have received no response from her.

And then of course, there was Lew Wasserman, the top Jew in Hollywood, from the old House Calls case.

Well, my answer to this all-important question is that far from being anti-Semitic, I am, perhaps surprisingly, PRO-Semitic, and HUGELY ENVIOUS of them.

I have always respected the culture of the Jews, and their education, which certainly exceeds mine. I look up to them, and their low numbers among the world’s population has always astonished me.  Always an outsider, I even believe I have the soul of a Jew. I have made a point of making close friends with Jewish people.  (In fact, more than one of my girlfriends was Jewish.)

I WANT TO BECOME JEWISH, so that I could be completely like them, recognizably the same, but without their religious beliefs, a secular Jew.

I believe that there is the APPEARANCE of networking and mutual backscratching taking place.  Of course, business is all about mutual backscratching, nothing wrong with that, but if I am right, I want to be a part of THAT network.
 
It is absolutely no coincidence that I believe I could then enter the places where Jewish mingling and socializing take place. Clubs, temples, agents’ offices and so forth, where right now I would be unwelcome and refused entry. Perhaps because I am no longer attached to a celebrity.

It was Adolph Zukor, that originator of things Hollywood, founder of Paramount Pictures, who ages ago gave this deathless advice to newcomers to the Hollywood scene: "Talk British but think Yiddish!" That was right up my tree.

To this end, I have entertained the thought of taking a hint from Careen Johnson, a struggling black bricklayer and funeral parlor assistant who, dying to become successful as an actress, changed her name to Whoopee Goldberg.  She was smart, it got her an Emmy, an Oscar, a Tony and a Grammy. And of course she had the great talent to back it up.

Now me, I could change my name to Clarkstein or Clarkberg, but would it help? Not bloody likely! If I became a Jew aspiring to become successful as an actor or a celebrity, I would surely be advised to change it back to Clark.

Don’t think so?  Look at Emmanuel Goldenberg, Muni Weisenfreund, Julius Garfinkle, David Kaminsky, Bernard Schwartz, Jacob Cohen, Joyce Frankenberg, Aaron Chwatt and Ephraim Goldberg.  They changed their monikers to Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, John Garfield, Danny Kaye, Tony Curtis, Rodney Dangerfield, Jane Seymour, Red Buttons and Frank Gehry respectively. And then there was Larry King (interesting choice, but what is wrong with "Larry Zeiger Live"?)

No, I’m afraid that that can only be my fantasy.

But getting back to the law, I did make a point of hiring Jewish lawyers, who always keep their original names perhaps as a badge of office, oh, and a Jewish press agent, thinking that would help.

The first to defend me was Melvin S. Goldsman, and Marci Levine, Esqs. of Freid & Goldsman, their names giving them away.

I fired them when I found that my Mel allowed his Jewish adversary to write a time sensitive stipulation to Nicolette that could have led to the cessation of hostilities, didn’t read it because he was out of the office and there’s no money in ceased hostilities, and told his secretary to tell me to sign it, which I did.  Boy, was I green at the beginning.  Perhaps they were old friends. Perhaps they performed regularly for the Beverly Hills Bar Association.

My next was Steve Mindell, Esq.  I fired him because he was about as  aggressive as my little son’s kindergarten teacher.  When I asked him to get Lynn to open a joint bank account with me so that she could pay her share of the upkeep of our joint property during the three years of my lone occupation, he simply told me she wouldn’t agree. When I asked him to get our joint stock portfolo released from the freeze put on it at the height of the dotcom bubble so we could cash out, again, he wouldn’t do it. It would have meant getting a court order, and he wouldn’t go to court for it. Nothing appeared to be happening, other than his endless bills.

So then I hired hit man Mike Kelly, Esq., a referral from a Topanga millionaire divorcee lady friend.  Of course, he’s Irish, (the worst kind, I hear someone shout – but that’s a joke).

My last lawyer (apart from my Appeal lawyers, also Jewish) was a Cy Schaffer (also a Jew), to whom I paid $50,000.  In court, Judge Gold said he had made an order that I was not to use funds from a tax refund to pay this lawyer, and he should immediately refund it to me. Schaffer protested.  Gold hunted for his order, then said he couldn’t find it, and told him he could keep the money.

I fired Mike Kelly after stretched out months when he alleged I was trying to get Nicolette evicted from her little house by not paying the property taxes, and it was going to be sold by the taxing authorities. He didn’t read the 1-page notice, which had been sent over to him by her tricky attorney Eliaser, who I’m sure had read it.  It wasn’t for me, it belonged to another John Clark, on a foreclosing property in South Central Los Angeles!

So now I was out of lawyers because I stopped believing in them, lost six hundred thousand dollars to them, and had no more money. That’s how I came to represent myself in court, and had to learn what it is to be a PRO SE.

Having wised up, my first appearance before Judge Gold was over the unread by my attorney property tax inquiry.  There was Eliaser, sputtering to the judge that I was trying to get his client evicted. I showed the court the 1-page notice showing it didn’t belong to me.  Judge Gold just smiled, and thanked me for being smart enough to catch it. I asked for a sanction against Eliaser for wasting the court’s time.  Not granted.

As for my Jewish press agent, a gentleman named Michael Levine, a self-styled media expert, I hired him to give me advice on handling the media now that I was suing Larry Zeiger -sorry, King.  I got no advice at all; he refused to visit me at my house, but I did find that my money, about thirteen thousand dollars, went towards starting his new wannabe Drudge Report, aimed at bringing down the likes of Mel Gibson and Michael Jackson and maybe me and others who APPEAR to be breaking his moral code (chuckle chuckle).  Networking again, is my opinion. But unlike Red Buttons, I did get a dinner, several actually. It wasn’t until after I had dropped him that I discovered that he used to be married to King’s current wife by whom he had a child. I think he should have told me about that before I paid him a penny.

If I ever get as drunk as Mel Gibson, I’m told that I tend to act out my Jewish fantasy while singing the freedom chorus of the Hebrew slaves in their banishment.

But when I sober up, I get to thinking more about what "they" did to me.  Here I am, my possessions lost or stolen, alienated by my kids and my family (I face back East to see them), removed from my house and my wealth by quasi-military enforcers, and exiled from Topanga, my Homeland. Then these words come to me.

As long as deep in the heart,
The soul of a Jew yearns,
. . . . . . . . . .
Our hope is not yet lost.

And Barbra comes to my rescue in song.