Last week was a big week for both me and for the Kristi G Company, and we’re still riding the roller coaster of excitement from being on the Meredith Vieira Show. This week I found myself in Las Vegas for The National Hardware show, so to say the last few weeks have been a whirlwind would be an understatement.
No, I haven’t forgotten about my five kids, although they think I have. With end-of-the-year school activities, my husband is going crazy playing mom while I’ve been traveling for work.
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As I was walking the convention halls with all these other businesses displaying their products, it got me thinking about a deal that I’m working on. I’m looking at the possibility of purchasing another company’s patent.
I wanted some quick legal advice on the fly, but my lawyer costs $400 per hour and he’s all the way back in North Carolina. It’s great that I’ve finally found a business lawyer that I trust and enjoy working with, but he is not typically available last minute and it sometimes takes us a few days to connect. So I decided to give Avvo Advisor a try. The Advisor site says you can get on-demand legal advice anytime, anywhere … well, Las Vegas convention hall should make as good of a test as any.
The process was beyond easy. Just three easy steps:
- Enter your zip code
- Select your topic (in my case, “business”)
- Pay a fixed-fee of just $39 and a lawyer will call you within 15 minutes to answer your questions and give you legal advice.
I am all about keeping things simple, and it was super simple to complete the whole process on my phone. It even has a money-back guarantee in case the lawyer wasn’t able to answer my questions, or I wasn’t happy with the experience in any way.
Let me just say that I could not believe that within two minutes of me clicking “agree and pay” on the checkout page, a local Atlanta attorney called me (I used my home zip code). I still can’t believe it! Especially since I had some hesitation going into this – before I found my current lawyer, who is awesome, I didn’t have the best experiences with the lawyers I had tried. It is most important to me that the attorney speaks to me in laymen terms, but doesn’t speak down to me.
Anyway, the lawyer who called me was Atlanta business lawyer Alan Kan. He told me he had been participating on Avvo for four or five years and practicing law for almost 10. Alan couldn’t have been nicer, more polite and truly wanting to help me with my question.
I’m not sure what I expected going into this call. I really just wanted to better understand the process of buying another company’s patent, what it would take to do that from a legal standpoint, and to maybe understand if other companies with similar products were infringing on the patent I was looking to buy. But as I was talking with Alan, he not only gave me a terrific overview of patent purchasing and helped explain things to me in simple terms, but he also helped me to better understand the question that I was actually asking.
If I did end up buying the patent, he asked, what did I want to do with it? Send cease and desist letters to companies who were infringing on the patent? Sue those companies? He encouraged me to look at potential outcomes of suing a big company, which could cost me upwards of $100,000. Was that something that I really wanted to do, or was my goal to purchase the patent for another reason?
By giving me some scenarios to think about, explaining the potential costs of purchasing the patent that I hadn’t considered, describing what it means for other companies to have similar products and what that really means for the patent owner, Alan gave me the necessary info to make a better business decision. Really, it helped me to refocus on the purpose of the patent and what value it would bring to my company.
I initially thought 15 minutes wasn’t a lot of time, but I sure received a LOT of advice and insight during my call. It was exactly what I needed to be informed and to take the next steps for this patent deal, as well as the next steps for the future of the Kristi G Company. Plus, Alan was so well versed and genuinely nice that it was actually an enjoyable call, like we had spoken before.
Overall, I was incredibly impressed with the quick response time, the call itself and the lawyer’s honest concern for giving me practical and sound advice. So if you’re a business owner who needs fast, easy and affordable legal advice for your small business, like I did, I highly recommend you give Avvo Advisor a try.
Until next time …
Kristi G.
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