Entrepreneurship & Startups
Starting a business is a great investment of time, money, effort, and creativity. And it needs strategic legal advice by a team of attorneys who understand how to help you get your idea off the ground, and then continue to assist you through the use of founder’s law in keeping your business profitable on a long-term basis.
Strategic Business Planning
The Entrepreneur Law Group LLP offers our entrepreneur clients with a wide range of services to help answer some of every entrepreneur’s most pressing questions and build a long-range business strategy:
- What are my business and personal goals?
- Which company structure best meets my needs?
- What should I do now to protect my intellectual property?
- How should I plan to protect future intellectual property acquisitions?
- What strategies should I use to fund my business?
Intellectual Property Protection
An application for a patent, trademark, or copyright is often the first step in protecting your intellectual property. Particularly in the computer and high-tech industries, intellectual property can be a company’s most valuable asset. Proper planning and collaboration between the applicant and an IP attorney can make the difference between solid and weak IP protection that makes the difference between profit and loss in high-tech industries.
Intellectual Property Planning
New clients often come to our offices with a particular problem to solve — patent infringement, for example. But the lawyer-client relationship often continues long after the particular dispute has been resolved. The Entrepreneur Law Group LLP can provide long-term intellectual property protection planning advice to our clients. Of course, we provide legal representation on particular disputes over patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and other intellectual property, but we take great professional pride in advising our entrepreneur clients on long-term IP strategies.
Intellectual Property Licensing
Once you have successfully obtained intellectual property rights, the next question often involves licenses. At the Entrepreneur Law Group LLP, we draft and negotiate all types of contracts for our clients, including corporate documents and licenses. One important concern is to continue protecting the core value of the intellectual property while creating enough value in the license that it is financially attractive.
Franchising & Distribution
We help early stage and growth stage companies with their decisions regarding whether to extend their trademarks, service marks and associated goodwill into formal franchise relationships (and how to properly avoid “inadvertent franchising”) and we help with other strategies for marketing and distribution including OEM Agreements, Reseller Agreements, and other Distribution Agreements. In all of this, we advise on best methods for avoiding disputes, for building in dispute resolution mechanisms, and for assuring smooth transition of business relationships established under such agreements.
Negotiations & Transaction Planning
We assist clients in planning for, preparing for, and closing of complex negotiations and associated transactions. Over the firm’s three decades of representing hundreds of clients, we have aided them in negotiations for acquisition of intellectual property including patents, copyrights, trade secrets and trademarks as well as for more general business negotiations such as for loans, startup capital, and preferred share transactions. We have also acted as special counsel in complex negotiations involving Mergers & Acquisitions, Asset Purchases, and Asset Sales as well as associated employment, advisor, and non-competition agreements with key executives, employees and contractors. In certain case, we have also been appointed to act as mediators and facilitators for joint venturers and other business partners in resolving matters without litigation and without any continuing threat of litigation using novel techniques developed in the course of Mr. Russo’s pro bono services for the federal and state courts and his pioneering work in CDR(tm), a more advanced manner of reaching resolution and the central practice of the non-profit Foundation for Creativity in Dispute Resolution which he chairs.
Mediation & Dispute Resolution
Nine times out of ten, a legal dispute will be solved in mediation or arbitration before trial. For this reason, it is important to select a law firm whose attorneys are experienced with alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Our team handles mediation and arbitration matters before the Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services (JAMS) and the American Arbitration Association (AAA) on behalf of our entrepreneurs.
Litigation Avoidance & Risk Analysis
Entrepreneurs constantly face the specter of intellectual property infringement. Patents are infringed, trade secrets are stolen, software is copied, and trademarked domain names are violated. Our experienced intellectual property litigation attorneys have successfully handled both sides of IP disputes. Our clients have ranged from individual entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 companies. We have been successful in representing both plaintiffs and defendants in cases that involve multiple litigations in multiple state and federal courts.
Business & E-Commerce Litigation
The Entrepreneur Law Group LLP teams are experienced in business and e-commerce litigation, should the need arise. We help resolve commercial disputes on behalf of all types of Bay Area companies, and we are frequently called on by our clients to pursue breach of contract or other claims against vendors or other business partners.