How To Sign Ohio Cease and Desist Letter

How to document type sign cease and desist letter ohio

hi i'm elizabeth gearhart i'm here with richard gerhart founder and owner of gearheart law a full-service intellectual property firm and oftentimes clients ask him for a cease and desist letter so that's what we want to talk about yes the old cease and desist letter you can either be on the giving end or the receiving end it's much better to be on the giving end of a cease and desist than the receiving end but we help clients with both kinds of letters either sending them out or responding to cease and desist letters that they've received and of course a cease and desist letter regarding intellectual property has to do with the violation of a patent or a trademark and it's usually the owner of the intellectual property is seeking to assert their rights against a potential infringer so for example if one of our clients finds out that their trademark is being infringed by a third party we'll review their trademark and we'll review what the third party is doing and then we'll send them a cease and desist letter in an effort to get the third party to stop infringing our client's mark and so that's the first step and how much does that cost about well it depends on the issue but it could be anywhere from 700 to several thousand dollars uh in in order to prepare the letter it depends on how much detail is required how much research is required okay so what's a typical one though is there a typical one is there such a thing no okay you send the cease and desist letter and then hopefully they stop using the trademark well usually they find a lawyer and they'll review it with their lawyer and once in a while it just stops at the cease and desist point the other party agrees that there's an issue and sometimes they'll just stop infringing right off the bat and that's the end of it sometimes there's a negotiation over the whether or not there's an infringement or how strong the infringement is or what the remedy should be and lots of times it can just be resolved and settled through the discussions between the attorneys finally if that doesn't work then if our case is strong enough and if the client wants to move forward with the with the litigation then we can file litigation on their behalf and stop the infringer yeah and and that's important because it could be worth lots and lots of money if somebody's using your trademark or you can do it for can you do that for patents too cease and desist yeah it's the same process for a patent versus a trademark if you notice that you're somebody is infringing your patent your patent holder then we can send a cease and desist letter to stop them and it's basically the same process sometimes it stops right away sometimes it resolves the case resolves itself and with a license sometimes we decide to go to court so what are they supposed to cease and desist selling it making it distributing it anything they're doing well in theory if they are violating your intellectual property you are entitled to all of the above remedies so you can they can you can ask them to stop selling it you can ask for damages for past sales in certain circumstances you can get lost profits um you can prevent them from selling in the future so there's lots of remedies available sometimes the parties reach a license agreement and and that the ip owner gets paid for the sales of the other other parties so that there's all sorts of different situations and it just really depends on what the client is trying to accomplish so do your clients ever get what i would call frivolous cease and desist letters sometimes it happens we've had those in occasion and those can be very frustrating to deal with when the claim of the third party against our client is so off base it's uh it doesn't even make sense to to anybody who's reading it and it's basically an extortion and we have had those kinds of situations and sometimes they're kind of you know difficult to get rid of in the end we do our best to get rid of frivolous claims how often do you think you send a cease and desist letter uh it really depends i mean it's can be you know several a month i didn't know it's that many yeah well there's a lot of infringers out there so they come in different ways too for example if somebody has a trademark somebody may not file a cease and desist but they may fail in opposition with the trademark office which is another type of enforcement proceeding yeah it's something that we have a lot of experience with and we try to apply good business judgment taking into account the cost of the enforcement but also the value that the client would get by pursuing it so we don't just because somebody's an infringer doesn't necessarily always mean that it's worth the money to go after them but we try to find creative ways to for our clients to get value from their ip and we try to avoid litigation could somebody a client write their own cease and desist letter they can and in certain circumstances sometimes that would be the best approach would be to have a client approach another business owner or organization on a business level a lot of times that kind of business-to-business connection can help resolve things but if it doesn't then it the lawyers should get it you know get involved at that point lots of times there's disagreement about whether there's actually a violation of rights and really the lawyers have to be the ones to kind of dig through that and come to agreement or not on the uh the actual legal rights that are involved but yeah oftentimes we'll recommend that the client reach out and try to resolve it without a lot of legal fees well that's great that sounds like you're really taking the client's best interest to heart so oh absolutely nobody's ever happy with litigation and so especially not the lawyers who have to get up at midnight well i mean it's just it's it's not pleasant for anyone and so it should be avoided if possible so great well thank you so richard how do people get ahold of you you can find us on our website at gearheartlaw.com that's g-e-a-r-h-a-r-t-l-a-w dot com or you can call us our number is 908-273-0-700