Miteva Law is a corporate and intellectual property law firm focusing on legal services for small to medium sized businesses and non-profits. Miteva Law’s main goal is to provide broader access to legal services for entrepreneurs by filling the void between free legal services and prohibitively expensive hourly lawyers. Miteva Law’s services are tailored to clients’ budgets, providing quality cost-effective legal services.
Miteva Law’s services include, but are not limited to: corporate and intellectual property legal advice for individuals and businesses; intellectual property acquisition, protection, prosecution, enforcement and licensing; structuring, negotiating and mediating collaborative businesses and projects; corporate and individual contractual relationships; full service star-up legal services; legal opinions and advice; non-profit consulting and securing of 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.
Maintaining a full time general counsel is not always necessary and can be prohibitively costly for most businesses. Miteva Law provides general counsel services on an on-demand basis at competitive rates and with options of flexible fee arrangements which fit your budget and business model. Just like businesses with an in-house general counsel, your clients have immediate access to legal answers from an attorney they trust and with whom they have an established relationship.
Some of Miteva Law’s outside counsel services include: contract drafting, reviewing, negotiating, enforcing and defending, structuring and facilitation of business transactions, employment/contractor/consulting agreements, non-disclosure/confidentiality agreements, employee handbooks, advice, privacy/harassment policies, intellectual property protection, enforcement and licensing, industry regulation updates, advice and compliance,
registered agent services.
Logos, packaging, product names, how a business reaches out to its consumers and how it differentiates itself from competitors are some of the most valuable assets a business develops. While using a trademark in commerce is tantamount to owning it in the United States, registering trade and service marks brings a multitude of other benefits such as a presumption of validity of the mark, right to exclude others from using marks confusingly similar to a registered mark, ability to sue in federal court to enforce trademark rights, etc.
All these rights come very handy if a business is ever faced with the possibility of having to enforce or defend its intellectual property and a certificate of registration goes a long way at mergers or acquisitions negotiations. Miteva Law provides comprehensive trademark registration and prosecution services, including federal and state registration in the United States, as well as international trademark registration under the Madrid Protocol. Additionally, Miteva Law offers comprehensive trademark counseling, clearance, searches, counseling, and enforcement.
Protecting a trademark does not stop at receiving a certificate of registered mark. Businesses are charged with the responsibility to protect their intellectual property from being infringed by others and in certain situations, rights to use a mark may be revoked or highly restricted if the mark owner does not timely and firmly enforce its rights. The list of ways in which trademarks are infringed is long and it was significantly increased with the help of the Internet.
In addition to the customary unauthorized use of trademarked names or symbols, trademark owners have had to be vigilant about counterfeiters and cyber-squatters (purchasing domain names containing a registered trademark prompted the enactment of anti-cyber-squatting laws embodied in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), to name a few.
Larger businesses with legal departments have in-house procedures for policing intellectual property, for the majority of businesses today which own valuable trade or service marks, but do not employ full-time lawyers, it is important to secure the services of outside legal counsel to monitor attempts to register same or substantially similar trademarks. Miteva Law offers trademark enforcement services and policing strategies which include monitoring of your intellectual property and contesting potentially infringing attempts to register similar marks, as well as handling of cyber-squatting and domain name disputes.
Trademarks are not just assets which bring instrumental value, they often have intrinsic value aside from the ability to distinguish your goods and services from others. This means that you can use the good will you have vested in your trademarks to monetize this investment by licensing your trademarks to others who value your branding and wish to piggy-bag on its fame and recognition. This can be beneficial not only for your bottom line, but also for preserving and even increasing the value of your marks by strategically associating them with other brands. Miteva Law will help you assess the strength and value of your registered marks and will negotiate with you licensing agreements which achieve your goals and address your concerns.
Chances are that if you are running a business today, you have valuable copyrights to protect. Surprised? It is a common misconception that copyright protection is something that only writers, visual artists and musicians can benefit from. With the emergence of the Internet, overwhelming number of businesses have online presence and offer a plethora of free information for their website visitors. Anything your business has originated, whether it is photographs, branding graphics or online tutorials, manuals of frequently asked questions, is subject to copyright protection.
Did you hire a web developer or a software developer to work on your product or website? If so, you you need to make sure not only that you and not the developed owns the copyright, but also that you have this valuable asset registered as belonging to you. Now you may believe that the cost of securing copyright in these business assets is not worth it because your business’s primary focus is elsewhere. Most people are amazed at how inexpensive it is to register copyright and how impressive the benefits of registration may be. The registration fee with the United States Copyright Office is $35.00.
The advantages, on the other hand, are numerous:
Miteva Law offers copyright registration, contractual protection of copyrights, as well as drafting and negotiation of copyright licensing agreements.
Similarly to trademarks, copyright ownership may bring countless advantages to individuals or businesses, both measured in prestige and revenue. In addition to representing writers, publishing houses, visual artists, collectors, musicians, record companies, etc, Miteva Law frequently represents businesses spanning various industries who wish to protect or exploit their copyrights.
As Voltaire once said, “Common Sense is not so common,” the assumptions you make may not be the assumptions other parties involved in your company or project make. Structuring the appropriate entity for you business or project, segregating and protecting your personal assets from those of the business, crystallizing entity owners and its control.
What seems obvious and understood when waters are calm, may become a point of contention among partners, co-creators, joint venturers, or service providers, once disagreement arises. Miteva Law is focused on helping you vocalize and clarify duties, responsibilities, and expectations and pin them down on paper, which preemptively works to establish roles within the company or project and makes the resolutions of later disputes easier, faster and much, much cheaper.
The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
- John F. Kennedy