The Traklight Blog

There's never a bad time to address and mitigate any of the potential risks that your business faces, but the new year is a particularly apt time for most people to reassess where their attentions and efforts have gone and where they should go in the coming months. It's a chance for all of us to do better and correct the mistakes of the past, and for businesses, it should provide an opportunity to gain a handle on that most vital part of any company's past, present and future: intellectual property.

This is a guest post from David Krekeler of Krekeler Strother, P.C. and was originally featured on the Krekeler Strother blog.

The new year is an opportunity for a fresh start in our personal and professional lives. But many still fail to tackle the intellectual property issues that their business could potentially have to deal with, resolutions or not. While you should be managing your IP from its inception, it's better to start late than never; here are some tips on identifying and protecting your IP for 2019.

Dig hard enough, and you can find curious cases of copyright dispute around the world pertaining to things that you might never have guessed would be subject to a copyright claim. It seems that if there's a product or creation or invention worth protecting, people will take whatever steps necessary to try and protect it, even as it launches us into new and unexplored avenues of intellectual property that would seem more at place on the Food Network than in a courtroom.

Nimbus Of Counsel Mary Juetten recently sat down with Sam Glover and Aaron Street to record an episode of the Lawyerist podcast. In the episode, Mary discussed year-end finances and data-driven processes in the law firm. Here are some of the highlights of her conversation:

For those who follow the news, the rise in dissent and argument in public discourse is inexorably linked to the growing split between two bodies, once united in a common goal but now more divided than they've ever been. Heated rhetoric flies back and forth between the two parties and their designated representatives, with lines drawn in the sand and allegiances publicly declared. Neutral onlookers and the nation as a whole are left to wonder if there is any way to save the union and the higher ideals it is meant to represent.

Much of what we consider when thinking of copyright concerns centers around how we interact with works created by others: is something being misappropriated or misused by someone else who doesn't have the authority to do so, or simply taken without compensation in the case of piracy? Left unconsidered is the copyright questions that exist within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) surrounding things bought and paid for by consumers, and what rights they have to alter those products after paying for them.

This article was originally featured on VoyagePhoenix.

No stranger to podcasts herself, our own Mary Juetten sat down with Lawdroid Founder and CEO for a wide-ranging interview. The conversation touched on her life, career and education before legal tech and the lessons and influences she took from each and the path that brought her to the law and legal tech. They also discuss the founding of Traklight and the growth of legal tech since its founding, the "accidental business" of Evolve Law and its unexpected growth and unintended benefits, her work as a lawyer for Nimbus Legal and Juetten Law, juggling different ventures, legal education, plans for the future, and so much more.

This post was originally featured in Above the Law

This is a guest post by Keri Norris, SVP of Legal and Regulatory Affairs and General Counsel for LegalShield, a legal services provider offering coverage plans and memberships to individuals and businesses. It was originally featured on smith.ai.

In what can be a cutthroat competitive landscape, small margins can have a big impact. It's small differences that can help to set one company ahead of another in the marketplace, and every business is striving to establish its own competitive edge. While most play within the rules (or at least keep their malfeasance from public view), we occasionally see the legal battling that happens when one business believes itself to be wronged by a competitor whom they accuse of stealing their work or ideas or knowledge to get ahead.

Clio's annual conference brings together lawyers and legal tech enthusiasts to learn and share their insight and experiences to hopefully move their respective professions forward collaboratively.  At the 2018 Clio Con, Mary Juetten sat down with Kevin O'Keefe of LexBlog and Legal Tech Founders to discuss her own experiences with Traklight and her insights and advice for prospective entrepreneurs. Here are the main takeaways from the interview:

This is the second part of a guest post from Chad Otar, CEO of Excel Capital. You can read part one here.

This is a guest post from Chad Otar, CEO of Excel Capital

A successful business can set you up financially– for life, with some grit and a little luck.

Mary Juetten’s second book, The Business of Legal: The Data-Driven Law Practice launched at the end of last month as a Kindle offering on Amazon.* Again written in plain English, with simple case studies, Juetten provides an approach for lawyers and other legal technicians to use data and process to drive change. Mary uses her thirty-year plus business, accounting, law, and consulting background to provide a road map for lawyers looking to improve their firms, all in less than 100 pages, complete with pictures! Actually, any professional can adapt the book’s advice to create a data-driven successful practice.

The advance of technology brings new problems that we are forced to grapple with. We're confronted with problems that we're ill-equipped to handle, because our society is forever trying to catch up to the last issue that upended some part of how we live or work or entertain ourselves.

Starting a business is a complicated process, and with any difficult and time-consuming effort, it is inevitable that a mistake or oversight can happen despite the best intentions. The long hours can leave you frazzled, and there simply aren't enough hours in the day to attend to every detail that you'd like.

Trying to be "cool" is ultimately a futile effort, because that effort in and of itself seemingly makes one "uncool". Doubly so for brands that are trying to chase trends rather than set them. In an attempt to sound like billion-dollar corporations are in fact run by chill 22-year-olds who "get it", you can end up coming across like a satirical meme. Nevertheless, companies try to chase the youth market by sounding like parents trying desperately to stay relevant by using the latest slang that has filtered through to them, perhaps because they haven't bothered to actually talk to any of the young people they're trying to sell to.

Companies get big by protecting their intellectual property (among other things), but what happens when they become huge? It can be hard to manage a massive international concern as it is, and trying to fend off a multitude of instances of infringement while handling all of the other daily corporate concerns can be like trying to play whack-a-mole while juggling. It's important to protect your brand and send a message to other scofflaws, but can it prove to be a case of exerting more resources than you're losing when weighing the cost of continued legal action?