You want to rebrand your business. Maybe your business has expanded. Maybe your mission has changed. Or, maybe the logos are out of date. Whatever the case is, your first step must be to have a crystal clear why you are rebranding and who you...
I’ve often said that a contract is nothing more than a written description of a business relationship. Often times this relationship can get complex. Maybe you have a contract that is pretty long, such as the purchase or sale of a business. This is usually...
Many years ago, when I was new to the legal profession, I was assigned to review a large volume of contracts as part of due diligence for a business purchase. I was part of a team of six attorneys reviewing the documents, which were some fairly standardized contracts in...
Often when small or medium sized businesses who are contract dependent are dealing with their customers, one of the most difficult things to understand is how the layout of a contract improves the overall quality of the contract. Recently, there has been a trend in the legal world that lawyers...
How many times have you looked at a lengthy contract and thought to yourself – I really don’t have the time for this; I don’t understand this. Often times, non-lawyer folk want to understand the basic facts and leave technicalities of contracts to their lawyers or business advisors. Sometimes,...
This month Matt returned to speak with the Design Domination podcast, offering advice to graphic designers who do branding work for their clients. What do designers need to know about registering a trademark? Let’s dive in. The truth of the matter is that if graphic designers knew...
For those of you reading this who are not from Maryland, our state has a unique flag and people are proud of the flag. Not unsurprisingly, quite a few businesses who are proud of their state, and not just Marylanders, want to incorporate their state...
A couple of days ago I met with a client who is dealing with some changes to her employee manual. This is a creative firm and one the questions she had was: what are the intersections between non-compete agreements and freelance work by her creative...
My column for AIGA Blue Ridge is available at this link. I don't normally do the dissection of a particular case unless it has a great deal of meaning or merit. But this column is about a specific case involving a graphic designer, a non-paying client,...