Today, Mincov Law Corporation celebrates its second birthday.

It’s been a great year.

I was blessed to have served dozens and dozens of clients who are now my best walking testimonials.

I have streamlined a lot of processes and as a result launched the Trademark Factory™ that offers Canadian business owners the best way to register their trademarks in Canada.

In terms of my personal, professional and business growth, this was the best year ever.

Before I start accepting your congratulations and best wishes, I would like to thank all of my clients.

I really mean that.

Maybe letting your customers know how much you appreciate them is considered “old school” these days, but it matters deeply to me. I wouldn’t be here without you and I value that relationship intensely.

I would also like to thank all those who have supported me along this journey. I am so grateful to have you by my side.

Thank you!

Now, time to celebrate! Tomorrow will be the first day of MLC’s biggest 3rd year breakthrough.

If you came to a restaurant and asked if they could make a good steak for you, and the waitress told you that they’re not sure but they are sure going to try very hard – what are the odds you would order it?

If you asked the waitress how much the steak is going to cost, and she told you that it costs $10 to place it on the grill and then the chef is going to charge you by the minute depending on how difficult it is to cook it to the perfect temperature – how likely would you be to order it?

If – not being convinced that they are any good at steaks – you then asked the waitress if they would offer you a refund if the steak would not come out right, and told you that there would be no refunds because they would have invested a lot of time, products and effort trying to the best of their abilities – would you ever order it from that place?

Below is a typical response that a business owner would receive from the vast majority of law firms and trademark agents in Canada to the question how much it would cost to register a trademark in Canada and whether or not the firm would provide any guarantees:

With regard to approximate costs, we attach a copy of our latest Schedule of Fees for your reference. For your convenience, we highlight the approximate costs of preparing and filing a single trademark application as $XXX plus official fees of $XXX. If the trademark application proceeds directly to allowance, the fees applicable to registration of the trademark application will be about $XXX plus official fees of $XXX.

If an adverse examination report is issued during examination, we will docket such response and report to you with our recommendations to overcome the objections raised in the adverse report as well as the approximate costs. The prosecution costs for the matter will vary depending on the nature of the objections raised and the hourly rate of the lawyer preparing the response. The writer’s hourly rate is $XXX. The approximate cost of reporting to you will be from $XXX. Complex objections requiring submission of evidence are subject to highly variable cost.

Most applications take 14 – 18 months from the date of application to achieve registration if there are no significant delays, but if the application is ultimately unsuccessful, we do not offer a refund.

No wonder most business owners are terrified of registering their trademarks in Canada. A low-cost application fee is simply a bait to get the customer in the door to then bill and bill until the application is either registered or refused. What business owner would not agree to pay a few extra hundred dollars after investing a thousand already? And then just another few extra hundred dollars here and there?

Don’t believe me? Call any law firm in Canada and ask two questions:

1. Can you guarantee a fixed flat rate that would cover the entire process from start to finish, including responses to all office actions that may be issued during the process?

2. Do you guarantee that the trademark will be registered, and if the application is ultimately unsuccessful, will I get my money back?

Now compare their response with the answer you will receive from the Trademark Factory:

We charge a flat rate of $2,000 + tax + government fees for one trademark application in Canada (the total comes to $2,690). This amount covers everything from the initial search of registered trademarks, drafting and filing the trademark application to unlimited follow-up correspondence with the Trademarks Office, responding to all office actions, filing the declaration of use, and obtaining the registration certificate.

We guarantee that the Canadian Intellectual Property will approve your trademarks. Otherwise, you get all of your money back, including the fees you paid to the government.

If you use a remarkable name, logo or tagline for your business, the Trademark Factory™ is the perfect solution to register them as trademarks in Canada.

On April 18, 2013, I will deliver a free 2.5-hour workshop on intellectual property in plain English for business owners.

This workshop is organized by DigiBC, the Digital Media and Wireless Association of British Columbia.

As an attendee, you will walk away not only with a ton of useful information about what different areas of intellectual property can do to and for your business, but also with several tangible tools that will allow you to start building the IP strategy for your business.

If you are running a business and don’t have a clear and viable IP strategy, this is a workshop that you can’t afford to miss!

To attend, you must register at http://mincovlaw2013.eventbrite.com/.

Often, I get requests to draft a simple agreement whereby the business owner who paid or is about to pay for some content created specifically for that business would own copyright in what they pay for.

Just today, I got a call from an existing client. They hired a videographer to create videos for their business. Now the videographer is claiming that my client does not own copyright in the videos. However surprising this may be to most people, the videographer is correct, at least from the legal standpoint.

Unless there is an assignment of copyright in writing, the copyright remains with the person who created the work, in this case, the videos.

Often, the client’s situation does not justify hiring a lawyer to create a completely customized agreement.

So I decided to share the template that I developed as a result of many years of writing these agreements in different jurisdictions.

If you hired someone to create content for you or you are about to hire someone to create content for you and you don’t have a budget to document the transfer of intellectual property from your contractor to you, you should definitely check out these templates. They may not ideally fit your situation and are not offered as legal advice, but in my experience, they should take care of 90% of the situations that usually arise around such facts.

This is where you can download standard Content Creation and Copyright Assignment templates at a fraction of what it would cost you to have a lawyer draft a customized contract. Check out the previews and see for yourself that the level of details covered in these templates greatly exceeds anything that you can download for free on the Internet.

Hoping that this will be of value to you.

On February 13, 2013, I delivered a seminar on intellectual property at the New York Institute of Technology in Vancouver.

Great to see so many aspiring students with lit-up eyes who came to learn about IP.