Once your business is established it needs to run smoothly, contracts completing on time, bills paid and employees supporting the business.
Everyone is familiar with terms and conditions, particularly for online transactions. The importance of them to the wellbeing of your business can not be underestimated. It is vital to consider the terms and conditions under which you intend to trade or offer services, and to make sure that they match your business. They set out how you intend to operate, the commercial terms you want and the image you wish to communicate to your customers, so a pretty important document.
It may be tempting to pull a standard set off the web and simply change the name but we would caution against this. Every business is different and you need to make sure the STCs are right for your business and your clients. As important as the included terms may be what is missing, it could be the STCs do not have adequate payment arrangements in them, without which it could be tricky to pursue bad debts.
We can work with you to prepare appropriate documents which satisfy all relevant legislation and are fair to your clients and your business.
Although people are at the heart of any business, ideas are very often a central part of its value. These ideas, collectively known as Intellectual Property, can and should, be protected in the same way that other aspects of the business are protected.
Intellectual Property can take many forms – for example,
Many businesses do not realise the value of their intellectual property and many more do not take any steps to protect it from unfair use by rivals. Still others consider that if any idea is in the public domain they are entitled to copy it and thereby infringe the intellectual property rights of others and become exposed to claims. Protection of intellectual property should be a priority for the owners of any business. The legal rules relating to Intellectual Property can be complicated.
We can assist you at all stages of the process of identifying and protecting these rights; including statutory rights of:
Furthermore, even if there is not a statutory right of this nature, there may be ways to use the law to protect ideas through the rules relating to:
Some rights can be acquired without any positive step being undertaken. For example, acquiring the copyright in the literary work can be acquired on simply proving authorship. Other rights, such as acquiring a trademark, are dependent upon registration or active steps being taken.
It is sometimes difficult to understand whether all information in the public domain may be reused and, if so the limits of such use. We can advise you at all stages when dealing with your own intellectual property rights or claims that you have infringed the rights of others.
We can advise you in relation to the protection of your rights whether they be in context of preparing agreements relating to:
If you have any questions about Intellectual property law or commercial law please let us know.
For expert commercial legal advice, contact our Maidstone, Tenterden, Canterbury and East London solicitors today.
