Salena Knight 0:02
So hey there, and welcome to the bringing business to retail podcast. If you're looking to get more sales, more customers, master your marketing and ultimately take control of your retail or E commerce business, then you're in the right place. I'm Selena Knight, a retail growth strategist and multi award winning store owner whose superpower is uncovering exactly what your business requires to move to the next level. I'll provide you with the strategies, the tools and the insight you need to scale your store. All you need to do is take action. Ready to get started.

Salena Knight 0:53
Hey there and welcome to the bringing business to retail. Podcast. Now I don't know how many times I have seen in a Facebook group that somebody posts that their EComm website has been hacked, but they don't mean hacked. What they mean is cloned. Somebody has taken essentially their whole entire website, or maybe just a product, and the copy and the images, and they're impersonating a legitimate brand. And I'll be honest, it was only two weeks ago that I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and a store came up, and I had been looking at dining chairs. And if you listen to the podcast, you will know I talked about the dining chairs, and this brand came up and the dining chairs, but they were ridiculously low priced, like, I think that's something like $79 when the chairs were four or $500 each. And so I immediately my red flags flew up, and I clicked through, and it was obviously a scammed website. However, what I noticed was it looked almost identical. The URL was almost identical, and this was a paid ad. And you would think, if someone is running a paid ad to a website, but you would think that meta had done some kind of protection to make sure that your money was going to a real company, but not in this case. And so I thought this was such an important issue, but I wanted to bring you on someone who knows way more about this than I do. So welcome to the show. Steven weigler from eMERGE console, you are going to help us not only protect our EComm websites, but also give us some ideas on what we can do if we find somebody has taken our websites and cloned them, or taken our products, or even the look and feel, all those kinds of things, and they're using it to impersonate our brand. Thank you so much for your time today.

Steven Weigler 2:41
Well, Serena, it's, it's so good to see you. How you explained it is, is you explain it very well. And it kind of, it was thought provoking for me, because a lot of what we deal with in in the United States, in in our legal structure, and also Australia, it or Britain, it doesn't matter. We coming from the common law, the law takes a really long time to pull together. So the law like centuries, and so the law that a lot of us use to enforce some of these things is a lot older and really focused on, you know, horse, bees and and the idea of maybe stealing an ad or having a candy bar in a store that looks similar. And now we're in the 21st century where everything is exponentially easier and and also very electronic and very on a million omni channel, um, as far as marketing, and so, you know, I don't think, thinking about it, the laws really have not necessarily caught up to the type of infringement and type of counterfeiting and piracy that we see in the world, nor is is the international relations at its all time high. And so we have an issue also, because this is not only coming from just the United States, or just Australia, just just, uh, Britain, it's, it's coming from other countries a lot of times. And so, you know, we have to take into consideration how the laws interplay with each other.

Salena Knight 4:10
And I was going to say, surely, that whole cross border thing becomes very complicated, because we read all about in, you know, third world countries where there are whole scam farms, like whole buildings with hundreds, if not 1000s of people trapped in there whose whole job it is to scam other people's money. And this is just one of the, you know, I think everybody's been on the receiving end of some kind of fraudulent scam potential. I just got the, I finally got the Hey. Mom texts the other day that, how old is that? And I finally, I finally got it. I felt, wow. They finally found me. Of course, I was very aware of it. But like you said, that whole like, digital is so hard to keep up with. I mean, AI, just in the last sort of 12 or 18 months has changed the game, and I know that if we have time, we'll talk about that. But even. Being able to for the laws to be able to keep up with this brings about a bigger issue, and I'm guessing it means that kind of a lot of people having to go out there and set the precedent and bring these things into the legal realm in order for the laws to change.

Steven Weigler 5:15
I think it super emphasizes what my strategies Alice been, which is to have a strategy even in my practice, I'm faced with the ability to omni channel market all the time. I'm getting calls from vendors in radio or less and less, but web plays pay to plays. I can go on and on. And so it's really like all right, what is first, I think the most important thing is to look at the strength and weakness, or what's really important to you in your market identity. I know a lot of my clients focus on E commerce, and so I can tell you, almost in my sleep, what is important to an E commerce brand. It's the brand, which the brand is, the identity of how a consumer is going to perceive it. And so it could go into product packaging. It could go into colors. It's definitely going to be the name, and how are they going to find you in E commerce. The E is electronic, and so it's going to be a domain. And so already, just by knowing in that particular type of industry, or even take my law firm, because my clients are all over the United States in the world, the internet's very important for me. It's very important for me to get my mission and branding message and everything out there using the internet. So I know that that's going to be an important part of what I need to protect. But say you were doing lawns, you were head of lawn care servants. That was local. Well, that would be all different set of things that are important to you. You're going to want to, you know, if paint your lawnmower is a certain color, so everyone, when you're you can see the lawnmower so and the Internet might be just a local type of thing where you have to protect it, and so it really is like you have to know your marketing plan and distill your business and or at least have a stake to put in the sand. We're building

Salena Knight 7:15
up a wall to reduce the chances that somebody can take our identity, of our brand, and then if something has happened that we have these legal standpoints, these these lines in the sand that we've drawn that show that this is our thing. Is that correct? Yeah,

Steven Weigler 7:36
I think that's a to take a step back. That's a good way to look at it. It's it's really like, if you're afraid that you're going to get infringed upon, which is happening a lot and lot more. Are your products going to be pirated? Your website's going to be pirated. You're going to see identical listings on Amazon or Walmart. You're going to see a Shopify site that's identical. That's going to be really difficult to take down. So before that happens, you kind of got to take a look at all right, what do I have and what's important for me in my product identity? Then you there's a

Salena Knight 8:12
really good way of putting it, is, what is important? Like, if somebody took this from me, if someone took this from our company, would it affect our brand, like, would it reduce the amount of sales that we get? Would it reduce the amount of customers that we would get? We reduce the amount of money, but our brand presence, all of those things, so that, I think you've hit the nail on the head for me, and I think that's such a pertinent thing, is what is important to us when it comes to our business and our brand, that if someone took it away, we'd essentially be screwed.

Steven Weigler 8:44
Yeah. And so then the next one, you kind of, and usually you work with an attorney or, and sometimes a brand or, but to really figure out what's the important What's your brand identity, what is the important pieces? And then you kind of look at, I don't have the, the the crown jewels in the Tower of London. So I have, I have, don't, I don't have to build a security system, but that, I have to build a little security system that almost any business, because every business has a brand or brand identity, unless you, you know, run private prisons or something, you know something that who cares what it's called, or you have the cure for cancer. I always use an example, because if you have the cure for cancer, forget everything I'm talking about, because you're going to make a ton of money. Who cares what it's called. If you can get it out there when it's pet, that would be a patent. But you get it out there patented, who cares what the rest of it? That's the wall. The patent is going to do everything. But most of us don't have the cure for cancer. No, none of us do, and so we're really focused on All right, let's take little pieces of what's really important and use four tools that attorneys and others use, which are trademark, which protect the brand. So when you see, I always you. Have people drive by a McDonald's and notice in the corner of the McDonald's on there's this little r tiny, they don't want you to see it, but it's, it shows everyone that that's a registered trademark. And if you go into a McDonald's, I could buy fold you and put you in a McDonald's in in Perth or Los Angeles. It doesn't matter, it looks like a McDonald's. So there's that's all brand identity. And so that's very advanced brand identity. But when I'm saying strategize, everyone has a little bit of uniqueness and brand identity. And so we have to distill it and be able to build a tiny little wall, one or two trademarks, maybe, to focus on on that element of a protection, which is for brand copyright protects like product packaging or color schemes or artwork on the on the packaging. Well, packaging is very important. A majority of the disputes are they copy your product packaging, and if they profit that, that's that can easily be handled through trademark, I'm sorry, through copyright. So that's copyright is it's a relatively simple application, but you have to know what you're looking for to build that part of the wall. You

Salena Knight 11:09
said that first of all trademark. Now trademark is going to cost you money, and to me, it is money well spent, and it's going to take you time, I know, for the trademarks that we have for scale your store and the retail Academy. I think it took us around about 18 months in the US. You know, sometimes you get asked additional information, and my attorney looked after that. But copyright is not a thing you pay for. Is it?

Steven Weigler 11:31
In the United States, it's suggested that you go through the US Copyright Office, because you can't sue unless you actually formally get the copyright. But to prepare the application, and you know, we're talking like a 200 something dollar investment total. Everything copyright is cheaper and takes less time, usually than than trade bot. The two elements of copyright are, are they original works of art, and are they in a fixed medium? So if it moves, that's not a fixed media, but if you could ever fix it, it's a fixed media. So film is a fixed media. Is a website, a fixed media. Website is a fixed media, but it can get really tricky. So and these people are paid to sit there all day, every day, and figure out what a fixed media is, and figure out what's original and what's not, and they unlike trademark, it's really difficult to do the search. So that's something that's usually a good idea to talk to an attorney about, because it's can get complicated kind of quickly, but it's cheap. The next one is patent. And patent is you have to get it before, and this is a general rule before you bring the invention to market. Patents protect inventions, so it can be a design invention. So the apple iPods are, are a design the way they're designed. There's nothing about how they work in on that design band. It's more like, you know what the product packaging looks like. You know what the when you put it in your gear, how it pains down. That's called a design patent. The other one is a utility patent. We just talked about the cure for cancer. That's a utility patent. You develop the cure for cancer, no one has it, and then you get exclusivity for about 20 years, as long as you publish it. If you guys are thinking that you have something that's patentable, have a discussion with a patent attorney, because my issue with it is, you patent it, you publish it to the we're talking about the world of infringement and counterfeiting. That's what today's discussion is about. In patent you're publishing what you invented. Well, there are people sitting in every country looking through what the patent publish are. They don't care if you at nivic or not. I mean, they don't care about their rights. They're going to try and infringe against your rights. You're just publishing out there. You better be really careful when, if you're going to, you're just to me, you're picking a battle that you might not be able to win. And so now I'm not saying I'm not dissing patents. The point is, you have to really think about it really strategically. To me, that's not my favorable form of protection. The fourth one is trade secret. So everything so for example, if you have a cookie company that you saw on the internet, the cookie recipe is, is trade secret. I think that's

Salena Knight 14:21
the big mac source, yeah, trade secret,

Steven Weigler 14:24
the Coca Cola formula, vegetable, the whole thing, like there no one knows what's in these things, and so they make a big deal about not that much. I think the Coca Cola formula is probably a big deal. It's a really underutilized form of protection, because if you can prove you took steps to make that secret, and someone ends up with it, like a ex employee, or someone broke into your computer, or whatever you packed, and you could prove you took steps to do it, to keep it secret, that's, that's a really, it's, it's a tort. Auditorium action that you can bring in. So you take all these little forms of not little, but weave these pieces together, and you have an intellectual property strategy. If you have a strategy, and you took something, some steps to protect all of these little interweaving, then you have the formula of the ticket to be able to take down on Amazon, or take down all those things, or who is all those things, but you need to take the steps first before you otherwise you don't have any tools. Like your wall looks like, like it's made out of

Salena Knight 15:39
there, and the mortar with the liquid

Steven Weigler 15:43
waters, you know. So, I mean, a domain of itself provides some production, but really, I like to look at it like, what's your strategy, what's important to you, and how can we get that protected? A lot of times, if you're a startup, it's going to be the brand, trademark first.

Salena Knight 15:59
Okay, can I just ask you there? Because you mentioned domains and one, and you mentioned that, you know, there's all the different options you have, the.com the.com.au the.co the fact that the.net all those sorts of things, when you put them together, one, that's probably a very cheap way, I guess, to protect what you own, you know, mortgage $50 each. But I do I was going to ask you, is it relevant to trademark your domain, like your key domain? So for me, it's Selena knight.com should I trademark that, or is that a bit useless? Yeah, it's a

Steven Weigler 16:35
really relevant question, because in the United States, the Supreme Court just weighed in on it. Does it.com? In and of itself, provide some sort of protection? Generally, no. But there's here. We have one 800 contacts.com which is actually the name of the company. So it's not one 800 contacts, it's one 800 contacts.com if it's an established name of the brand and consumers recognize it as a the name of the brand, includes a.com then Amazon, kind of, I mean, you know, might, some people might think amazon.com is the name of the company, and so that might be trademarkable. Um, but most of the time they're going to disregard the.com but the trademark all things, but it's, it's a, it's a fluid area the law. What I think is really important, this gets in an international is all right. And in fact, I have, I have cases right now where the infringements occurring in the United States and Canada and so, you know, our northern neighbor, get the.cf get the get the foreign domains. Get the EU, get Australia. This is really, really cheap protection, and chances are you're going to have a supply chain or and a sales channel that are just going to go international, especially if you're selling e commerce or or, um, goods that are shipped because, um, ultimately, you know someone in Toronto, if you're in the United States, someone in Toronto, it's what, 30 miles. Well, it's more than that,

Salena Knight 18:14
I don't know, but it's not very far. That's uh, Gloria.

Steven Weigler 18:16
It's really like, they, they, they're not going to be like, well, that's a United States company. So the point is, is that your channel of commerce, you have to trace where it's coming from. So a lot of times it's gonna be China. Ultimately, we want to pay some attention to where the product's coming from in your supply chain, when you're where you're getting it, and then ultimately, where do you think you're gonna ship it? Outtake, because your wall has to cover a little bit of that place. I mean, to me, the most obvious place to start is get the domain, at least it establishes some, some common law rights in those in those countries for like, you know, $6 $10 you know, when you're checking off the American one, why not put it up on the scene?

Salena Knight 19:00
So once we have all of those things, or we've put started to put those things in place, if we do find let's just go with your Amazon example, because I think that is extremely pertinent, especially if you're a product manufacturer, and your product is being made overseas. We see this time and time again, your supplier makes it, and then put somebody else's label on it, and they're selling it white labeled, or, you know, on on Amazon. If your products appear on Amazon, or say your brand appears on Amazon, what do you

Steven Weigler 19:31
do? So there's a couple of things that most people don't know. Is, if you see your your brand appear on Amazon, and it's not your brand. Chances are the infringement is much deeper than you even know. So what you see on the surface is kind of like the tip of the iceberg of the infringement that's probably going on around the world on your product. So that's already it can be a little too late. Courts in the United States are. Are grappling with how to handle this. If someone researched that and looked at a list of how many, when someone sees one, there's actually, you know, 375, of them. How to handle those? Because that's a huge lawsuit. So, but the point is, is, if you see it is probably deeper than than you have so then you take out your little chi, chi, meaning, wow. What was my IP plan? What did I did I protect the trademark? Did I protect the copyright? If you protect the copyright and you have a registered copyright, you can tell Amazon, hey, I have a registered copyright. You send it to Amazon, they'll take it down immediate so they'll do immediate takedowns, but you have to tell them, then there's something, and this is under American law, there's something called the counter notice, so that they would, um, they have, I believe I should know this, but it's 20 days. I believe they can say, the other side can say, um, Hey, I didn't, I didn't infringe. Now, what happens is, a lot of the infringers are in China. And maybe that's an overstatement, but my experience is, a lot of the infringers in China, and they don't care that much about American law, like they're infringers, or it's like they don't care, and they're not in the United States, and so they'll file the counter. Since I didn't infringe, then you're stuck with having to see them. Either you see them or the Amazon will put it back up, right? And so that's how it works for copyright. Now, if you have that and you have a trademark infringement, and you have a registered trademark, well then you have two quivers in your bow. Two ways to go about trying to take it down.

Salena Knight 21:44
And how difficult is it to say, say we're in this scenario. We've seen our product on Amazon. We've lodged the form Amazon. Have taken it down. The infringer has said, I didn't infringe, and now we have to sue them. Like, is that an expensive process? Is it a time consuming process? Is it something you can do yourself in

Steven Weigler 22:03
the United States, at least, it's very jurisdictional, so each you have to sue in, you know, the proper venue, and, you know, it's just like, and it's a big country, and so you have to find an attorney. So usually I call someone like an IP specialist like me, you know, filing a complaint. Yeah, it's a big deal. I mean, it's federal court. It's, it's, um, it's an unfortunate situation to be in, um, you really, that's why the wall has to look pretty good. Um, because you're going to avoid all this if you have a nice wall. It can be very daunting if we don't. That's why I'm emphasizing so much Selena, that you really have to start with having a strategy like before, any of that

Salena Knight 22:47
you've got to know what's important to you. Right? With all your experience with this, have you found that the infringes don't respond if it gets taken to the next level and you get a verdict or like a judgment in your favor, because they don't ever turn up, because I don't know, I'm kind of thinking that the infringers are like, Yeah, whatever. Like two fingers up in the air, and we'll let this product go, and we'll just move on to the next one.

Steven Weigler 23:13
Well, yeah, a lot of times they're not legit. So it's a shell game. It's always a cost benefit evaluation, like, if we if we think we can get their account frozen quickly and get a preliminary injunction, then we're sitting, we know we're sitting in a pretty good place. Well, we just have to constant. It's not that different within a surgeon doing surgery. You know, when you go in, you don't know exactly what's going to be in there, but you're going to do it the best way you know how, for the cheapest amount of money to get the best result. And if it's not that, if you're going to end up, you know, your leg is is not functional, um, even if we do the surgery, then you'll probably just sew it back up and and we'll figure out a plan B. And that's,

Salena Knight 23:57
I mean, and you don't go to a dentist if you've got heart problems, do you really going to the person who brokered your mortgage if you've got a trademark problem? Can we move on to another example? Thank you so much for that. Like, I think what you're basically trying to make everybody aware of is, if you just do the basics, if you just spend a couple of 1000s of dollars right at the beginning, a lot of these problems are going to be, if they turn up, are going to be a lot easier to solve and a lot cheaper to solve. Can we go on to the example that I saw, where I saw a Facebook ad for what was clearly a scam website, and my flags went up because the price was just too cheap. But when I went to the website, it looked identical to the big brand, like, you know, as a seasoned marketer and someone who is aware of online, I could see how somebody could be scammed out of their money very, very easily. And it always amazes me that one these people managed to get a meta Ads account, like the effort, you know, the hoops that you have to jump through, all those sorts of things. They got an ads account, they built a shop. Shopify store. So somehow they got through all the Shopify verification process. Because quite often they are on Shopify because me, I go in and inspect the source, because I'm always looking at these kinds of things, and then if they do take your money, you don't get the product. I mean, potentially, if you've paid with a credit card, you can try and get some legal recourse there. But as the business owner, if you see these things happening, what do you do? Like, what is step number one? If you can just walk us through, what are some simple things that we can do, and at what point do we call someone like you in Sure.

Steven Weigler 25:34
So the first thing is to evaluate what exactly they're doing. Like, if it's a it's a complete web copy. You're going to want the domain frozen, taken down to something called ICANN, which is the International Domain Registry protocol. And so you can strategically, either do it through the courts in any country, not any country, but most consumer countries, meaning where people buy a lot of stuff. You can also do it through pica. And so we're going to want to try and, you know, get the domain taken down, like ASAP. We're going to want to broaden prosecution for for trademark infringement. Or you brought up something that's really true. And in trademark, anyone could get a trademark. But when you get to be a famous brand, like if someone's ripping off Nike, well they have additional rights that a normal brand wouldn't have, because they're they're famous, and it's called, what is called as brand tarnishment. And so there's actual penalties, additional penalties for tarnishing a famous brand. And so they have it a little better. But they also have, you know, their legal fees, legal people, yeah, yeah. I mean, teams, I I just looked up. I don't remember the brand, but it was one of the brands, and I looked at almost 30% of their expense because it's a brand new company. It's like a Nike. It was a Nike, but it was like a company like Nike, a branding company is going to spend 30% of all the revenue they made on enforcing the

Salena Knight 27:14
protecting the brand. Yeah, protecting the brand. Back to what you said right at the beginning, which was what is important to you, and for them, what's important to them is the brand. They can stick their logo on anything, and it's a Nike product. They're not known for just t shirts, and

Steven Weigler 27:31
if they couldn't, they want to have a company. So yeah, it completely makes sense. And then the you know, apparel costs like next to nothing. So they don't even make it. They license so, but the point is, is, they're a brand new company, and so that's what they do. And so, you know, you have to look at it like we're gonna have to spend, you know, I don't cherish, like, spending people's money. I'm trying to take this stuff down. So we're always good. We're always gonna, you know, take a really, what's the best strategy. First, let's get the domain taken down. Number two, let's threaten, at least threaten, a federal lawsuit. Number three, let's it's always important to go for something called a preliminary injunction, because we're going to try and freeze our assets in the US, which is very threatening to them. Sometimes they'll wanted to make it right try and settle, because they know like, hey, if they take all my money out of my account, that's worse than me giving them some money. I

Salena Knight 28:28
was gonna say I had never even thought about until you mentioned it. I had never even thought about the potentially freezing someone's assets like that. To me, it was just like, stop the stop impersonating my brand. But the freezing someone's assets not only makes it more real, but makes the effort more realistic, if that makes sense. And so can we even take a step back here? And I know that inside of, say, meta, and this may not be your area of expertise, I'm just bringing this one on you. Inside of meta, you can always report, you know, copyright infringement or something like that. I've tried to do that in the past. Nothing happens. Is there a way like, if it is a proper This is my brand that's going to be tarnished. My customers are going to be scammed. Is there a way to get someone like meta to actually stand up and take notice and then following on from that? Is there someone like, is there something we can do with someone like Shopify or WooCommerce? I mean, WooCommerce is a little bit different, because it's a public platform. It's an open platform that you build upon. So apart from just taking the website down, can we move to that next level of whoever is, let's say, hosting the content, can we make those people do something against these big companies who, you know, they just seem like they never listen.

Steven Weigler 29:45
I'd say it ebbs and flows, is what I would say. I'd say I've had experiences where the platforms are very receptive to take downs and then they change. And they're not exactly broadcasting when this occurs and when it doesn't. But we, you know, we all have. The channels inside some of these platforms to find out the skinny. But then they leave, you know, there's huge company. But the point is, is they go through an effort where it looks like they really are trying to do something, and they really even broadcast in the Wall Street Journal or something, that they're spending $2.7 billion on these efforts and opening channels and going to trade shows, and then they don't for two years, then they do, then they don't, then they do, then they don't. Depends who the chief legal officers, depends on what kind of PR they need. You know, it's really like a complicated game. I think the most important thing is to just, you know, be vigilant. On, on, um, you and there's, if you don't have anything to be vigilant about, like you have no protection, don't bother. No one's going to do anything. I always am trying to take little steps, teeny little steps, to move, to keep momentum and keep the ball moving. Like, if you don't get a reaction from Amazon or Shopify or, you know, whoever how what's the next any little step we could take that's not gonna, you know, cause a major disruption in your pocketbook or your life, and just keep on taking those steps until we're kind of past the point of no return. About two years ago, I lost on a case I've missed the person waited too long. They waited like, you know, a year. And the judge is like, well, if they waited a year, how important it could be to me. And so he's like, he put it at the back of the line, and it is kind of like, my case in Florida, it's going to be like, we won't get it done until Christmas, after night of Christmas, you know. So then you you're kind of like, well, no one wants to stick around for it, to watch them slowly, very slowly, you know, move out of the park at the other side. So it's just really strategy matters so much at this point. I

Salena Knight 31:52
think what this has highlighted for me is one you need to get that foundation in order. Like, don't be stingy, because spending, you know, the things that you've said, the trademark, a few websites, maybe copyright, we're talking a couple of 1000s of dollars, like a couple of $1,000 now could save you 20, 3050, and the stress, like, as someone who's been through a legal battle, the stress that it has on your whole entire because these go for years, sometimes the stress that it has literally can tear you apart. But also having that trusted advisor like at least knowing that if I have this problem, I'm going to need an IP attorney or a trademarks attorney, and knowing who to reach out to and say, This is my problem. Is it even, like you said right back at the beginning the cost benefit analysis? Is it worth my while to do something about this for

Steven Weigler 32:49
an early stage company? It's like, I get it. I had an early stage company. Any money is like, it's hard to spend. And so if you do a trademark, right, you're going to do a thorough search, and a startup search is going to be a common law search too. We're going to go, we're going to use a search service to go from the internet and figures out all the iterations of possible. And you're going to get a really good idea if your brand is even a playable brand, whereas if you just file a trademark, you're not going to find that out for three four, because by the time it's examined, and then you get an opposition you're not, you're talking about maybe up to three years. So you it's good to know, like, where your brand sits up, up front. The second thing is, is, ultimately, what do we want to do as console? We want to build a company that's going to make it through due diligence, even if you're not, if you don't think you're ever going to sell the company, we want to have that kind of company that they're going to when you get to due diligence and they offer you, you know, you get a term sheet for $5 million that they're going to pay you $5 million at the time of the closing, because everything looks in order. If you don't have a trademark strategy, or you don't have a copyright strategy, you've been infringed upon and you really never did anything about it, or you put yourself in that position, even if you get that term sheet, it's going to start going down to four they're going to look at this and it's going to go down to 3 million. Or they might not complete the transaction. But I have seen, you know, where we get to that checklist, and you're like, these items are nowhere to be found and no one's interested. Like, no.

Salena Knight 34:25
I mean, own your IP. Like, own your IP. What are they going to find documented?

Steven Weigler 34:30
Like, like, you took it seriously. So, um, just for that reason, and that reason alone, even if you're like, Well, I have such a unique invention, I'm never going to get it, for example, whatever, but then you make steps on why that is such a unique invention and that you you took care of it that way. Steven

Salena Knight 34:49
Wiley, you've given us some excellent information, some great takeaways, some great action steps, if we haven't already done that in our business. Thank you so much for sharing all of that. If people want to reach out to you to get some help, hopefully not because they've been infringed upon, but to build that wall, where can they find you?

Steven Weigler 35:07
Our website is www, emerge, console, E, M, E, R, G, E, consul.com C, O, U, N, sel.com and we offer free initial consults. We want, our initial goal is we want to really grow with our clients. And so we want to get to know you. Want to get to know your brand. We want to get to know what you're thinking. But we also, we have our trademark program is called Total TM, and it's, it's very thorough and very program oriented and cost effective, and so if you want a free initial search or you just want to talk about your business, please just book some time with me, and we'd love to talk to you. There's also a lot of good resources on the website. Thank you so much for all of that pleasure.

Salena Knight 35:56
So that's a wrap. I'd love to hear what insight you've gotten from this episode and how you're going to put it into action. If you're a social kind of person, follow me at the Selena Knight and make sure to leave a comment and let me know. And if this episode made you think a little bit differently, or gave you some inspiration, or perhaps gave you the kick that you needed to take action, then please take a couple of minutes to leave me a review on your platform of choice, because the more reviews the show gets, the more independent retail and E commerce stores just like yours, that we can help to scale. And when that happens, it's a win for you, a win for your community and a win for your customers, I'll see you on the next episode. You.

Steven is the Founder and EmergeCounsel, a law firm that provides entrepreneurs all over the globe sophisticated business and intellectual counsel.

Over the years, Steven has built specific expertise in the nascent field of eCommerce law, an area in which he has helped multiple hundreds of online businesses from conceptualization all the way to sale.

He not only has decades of legal experience but also previously headed a successful educational technology startup in which he served as Founder, CEO, and General Counsel for seven years. Steven was also a Senior Attorney for a Fortune 50 communications company.