Ensuring the Lawfulness of Digital Signatures for Cease and Desist Letters in Australia

How to eSign a document: digital signature lawfulness for Cease and Desist Letter in Australia

[Music] hello and welcome to another episode of Hawthorne law TV my name is Jim Hart I'm your host again today and today I want to talk to you about five common cease and deist letter mistakes that I see people make all the time uh cease and deis letters are one of the most common things that I get asked to do as an attorney and uh so I want to share with you five common mistakes that I found that people make with regard to ceas and Tois letter so here we go let's start with number one all right so the first major mistake that I see people make with ceas assist letters is that they don't actually hire a lawyer to draft it for them now this makes no sense to me if you um you know want to take the time and effort to put together a ceas and desist letter doesn't it just make sense that you're going to actually hire a lawyer to do that for you because if it's coming from you it's not going to have any meat on it and um and if you actually want somebody to stop doing something that they're maybe doing illegally or maybe they're violating your intellectual property rights it makes sense to actually have a lawyer draft that letter so that's the first mistake I see people make second mistake I see people make is they send them out when they don't actually have anything to protect maybe you're a brand new startup maybe you're only in business for a couple months and you haven't filed anything you haven't registered any of your intellectual property and but yet you're sending out a ceas assist letter to somebody who's probably in the same position that you are maybe even a little bit further down the line than you are and you're asking them to stop violating your intellectual property perhaps or or doing something else um chances are even though you may have common law rights to some intellectual property that because you haven't registered anything you're facing a long legal battle anyway so there's really no point to sending these things out until you actually have something to protect the third big mistake that I see people make is that they they send these ceas and letters out to anyone and everyone you know anyone who's a potential competitor of them that might be somehow infringing on their intellectual property they're going to want to send a letter to and that's just a mistake you need to understand that every single time you send out a season assist letter you're putting your mark on the internet you know you're running the risk that somebody's going to take that letter and post it online and say negative things about you or your company um perhaps maybe it's going to clue somebody in that that actually owns um the rights to your own proposed trademark that maybe you haven't even registered yet that you're actually stealing their uh intellectual property so you want to be very careful and I recommend not sending these things out to anyone and everyone especially when you're a young startup all right the fourth major mistake that I see people make is empty threats and basically what this means is they're they're telling people to you know stop doing something or they're going to file a lawsuit within 30 days well if you have know intention of filing a lawsuit it really doesn't make sense to send a cease and to sisler telling somebody that you're going to file a lawsuit against them you're basically asking for a fight with a bully that you don't know anything about and maybe they're weaker than you maybe they're stronger than you you don't really know and so when you go ahead and start sending these things out without really knowing um what you're going to be able to do to back them up that's kind of a big mistake and a red flag in my opinion all right the fifth major mistake that I see people make with season assist letters is that they don't really have a plan they don't really know why they're sending them out they think that by sending these things out it's going to scare somebody to stop doing something nine times out of 10 that's not the case um you know and especially if it's coming from you and not a lawyer you know they're just going to look at you as an amateur and you know so you're basically just harming your business reputation in the long run so unless you have a legitimate reason for sending out cease and deist letter I recommend not doing that um at least in the startup phase of your business now this is not to say that there's not a time and a place for a ceas assist letter there certainly is and in my opinion here's the steps that I would take before I would send out a ceas assist letter for a client the first thing I would want to make sure that person is doing is registering all their intellectual property with the US patent and trademark office that's number one so you know following their trademarks following their copyrights you know following their patents if they have patents um making sure you're doing everything on the up and up online because the last thing want to do is send out some sort of uh season toist letter and have somebody use that as ammunition against you um in a trademark infringement lawsuit along with that you're going to make sure that you have conducted a comprehensive name search to make sure that you are not violating anybody else's uh intellectual property now this doesn't mean you go out there and hire somebody on Fiverr for five bucks to do a name search with for you on the US patent and trademark office that's not what I'm saying what I'm saying is you need to hire a lawyer or an outside service to conduct a comp comprehensive name search that means the US patent and trademark offices that means Google common law searches perhaps International searches uh you want to make sure that you're not violating anybody else's intellectual property before you send one of these out next you want to research the potential violator you want to know who you're dealing with is this somebody that's been involved in a lot of lawsuits maybe they have Deep Pockets maybe they're subsidiary of a bigger corporation that you need to be aware of um are they somebody who just opened up their business and is brand new and perhaps they're not going to be around in a couple years so what's the point in suing them now or even sending a c assist letter now you want to know something about the potential infringer of your intellectual property along with that you want to do a complete and thorough review of what this competitor is doing to make sure they are actually violating your intellectual property because if they're not sending a cnis letter is just going to be a feudal exercise for you and then finally you want to have a long and serious talk with an attorney to make sure that this is the right course of action for you because in some cases it is is in many cases it's not um so I recommend talking to an attorney and having a serious discussion about what it's going to mean to send out a CN assis letter before you actually go ahead and do that so that's all I've got for today make sure to follow us at hawthor law.net um where we post new articles videos Etc as well as on this YouTube channel make sure you hit the Subscribe button and check us out we'll be posting new videos on a pretty regular basis here going forward so [Music] no