The L+C Blog

Creative agencies such as marketing firms, website developers, and advertising and design groups can often be reluctant to approach the issues of confidentiality and intellectual property rights ownership with prospective business clients. Those who set agency policies may feel that asking for a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) is too off-putting during business development discussions – as…

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The use of freelance resources in the marketing world is a time-honored business practice. Sometimes you need freelancers for a specific client, for specific expertise, or to meet a crazy deadline. And increasingly, the industry is seeing the rise of business models like the virtual agency or strategic alliance models – giving creative services firms the flexibility to staff up, staff down,…

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I’ve been fortunate to be invited to contribute guest legal content recently on several blogs and news outlets important to the ad and marketing communities. To share that information with you, and as a big thank you to my “hosts,” here they are:

For The Agency Post, an interactive publication for ad and marketing professionals (www.theagencypost.com), I drafted a column about current…

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I spend a lot of time talking about one of my favorite (really!) topics – trademark protection for brands. Like most things that get better with practice, the more often I explain the process to clients, the easier it is to boil it down to a few simple, top level steps.

And so here, the 4 “Easy Steps” to brand trademark protection that Agencies and their clients need to know…

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In addition to publishing content on Legal + Creative, Sharon Toerek is a highly experienced speaker, providing insight on marketing law and intellectual property issues by speaking at popular national marketing industry conferences and regional industry events, including:

Content Marketing World

AdAge Magazine Small Agency Conference

BOLO Digital Marketing Conference

Agency…

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B.S.A. Three little letters that can strike fear into the heart of an Agency owner or IT department head.
For the blissfully unfamiliar, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) is an organization that enforces software copyrights for many of the “heavy hitters” of the industry, including, most relevantly for marketing agencies, Adobe and Microsoft.

Software companies engage BSA to…

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Brandholders (and the agencies that help them with branding work) are about to experience a new, “wild west”-style age of trademark clearance and protection issues with the release of new Top Level Domains (TLD’s) by ICANN, the U.S. registrar or internet domain names.

In light of its plans to release hundreds of new TLD’s in rapid succession, over 1,900 applications were submitted to…

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This post was originally published as a Guest Post on the designRoom Creative Blog (http://www.designroom.com) as a legal perspective on the use of words (“copy”) in marketing and advertising.  Thanks to the team at designRoomCreative for asking me to contribute my thoughts.

My friends at designRoom have creatively chosen the theme of words, copy, and content for this month’s…

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As a lawyer who advises ad and marketing professionals, I’m regularly reminded by clients that legal fees are not a fun way to spend marketing dollars.   This is understandable, and to me it’s also a somewhat welcome point of view.  If that sounds like an unusual perspective coming from “legal,” hear me out:  it is always less costly in the long run to have a proactive approach to t…

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I had the privilege recently to speak to a group of communications professionals, along with my friends Lisa Zone and Alexa Marinos at Cleveland PR Firm Dix & Eaton, about the legal implications of using social media in marketing communications.  You can read a bit about it here at Time.com http://business.time.com/2012/07/18/protect-your-company-from-social-media-mayhem-2/

It was a fun…

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