The worst thing about committing a legal mistake is that everyone seems to find it obvious after the event especially your wife/partner. If business owners started to create new, exciting, unique legal mistakes then it would be a real challenge for us lawyers-fortunately for us they do not.  This means that your lawyer has probably seen the legal mistake before and has a good idea what to do.  Although it may not seem that way to you. Many small business legal services can be divided into “deals” where lawyers prepare documents to anticipate and avoid future problems or “disputes” where things did not get documented at the start and the parties come out swinging.  Usually deals are cheaper than disputes.   Experienced business owners are adept at working out when to document and when to wing it. Mistake no. 1        You unexpectedly die and your business stops dead too. This can be very inconvenient. Avoid this by having a will including a busines...

  Thank you to all the subscribers to my podcast for their encouragement. The podcast is available at this link https://www.buzzsprout.com/666235 

  In collaboration with the Business Essentials Daily podcast we present   THE 10 GREATEST LEGAL MISTAKES IN BUSINESS. ..and how to avoid them Series  Episode 7 : Protecting your Business Secrets  You may also be interested in  The five types of intellectual property  or one of the  other Episodes in this series  The Business Essentials Daily podcast features interviews with business experts and industry leaders, providing up-to-date, insightful advice on wide-ranging topics, including winning sales strategies, HR issues, mental health and leadership including the Ten Greatest Legal Mistakes in Business Series. If you have a legal issue call a lawyer.   Paul Brennan   can be contacted on 617 5438 8199   SPONSORED BY

After years of waiting, someone has finally copied my work. They have used a nom de plume. Being copied, even by a fictitious entity, does not take away that warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that someone likes my work as much as I do, maybe more. I once wrote an article about a law firm being blessed by the Pope. You can find it online here.   It was accepted by a legal magazine for publication online. When I did not hear from them, I found that they had taken lines, which we clearly both thought funny, from my article and used them in their own piece as if they were their original work. Moral rights or, as we the plagiarized like to say, “Moral, I know my Rights” provides for a right for you to be named if your work is copied, and to control the form of the work, but there are exceptions. Also, there is “reverse passing off”, which covers plagiarism. The editor would not explain, apologize or print the article in full, but did take down the offending web page, and she offered a ...

I f you have read The Da Vinci Code (DC) and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (“HBHG”) as I have, you have probably decided that they are very different books. You will not be surprised to hear that a UK High Court judge supports our view. So how is it that what would have cost a legal advice fee of about a couple of hundred dollars on the Sunshine Coast in Australia has cost over $US4.5M in London?  Although it sometimes depends on the idea, the smart money was on DC, as every copyright lawyer knows that copyright does not protect “the idea but the expression of the idea”; although it depends on the idea.  For instance, a story where boy meets girl, boy loses girl and boy gets girl back is not protected by copyright. It is just an idea, and many stories have this theme. What if the girl was a cowboy? This is a novel twist (or so John Wayne would have had us believe), but still just an idea. What if you went further still and copied some words from a cowboy film such as “gidd...