Legal Blog of Attorney Greg Curry

It's a fact of the business world, with both startup and established businesses, that from time to time you're going to encounter legal issues that are scary and potentially expensive. A lot of these situations involve contracts--either you have to sue someone, or someone has sued you, for breach of contract. When confronted with these situations, you do need a lawyer. Because if the other side has a lawyer, and you try to handle the legal stuff yourself, YOU WILL LOSE. The law is tricky, and procedural rules are tricky, and the side that's "lawyered up" will push around and bully someone who doesn't have a lawyer. But, too often, when small business owners are faced with legal challenges, they just give up because hiring a lawyer and fighting would be too expensive. What brought this to mind was that I caught an older episode  of Shark Tank from 2012. A Lee Dahlberg came up with an idea for a business--putting carved, polished, rocks on bands that you w...

In a recent case , a restaurant (a business entity that owned/operated a restaurant) leased a building from the landowner. Sometime afterwards, the restaurant claimed it had been fraudulently induced into signing the lease (the decision refers to a "contract and lease") and sued the landowner for rescission (to undo) of the lease based on the fraudulent inducement. A claim of fraudulent inducement means the offending party lied (made misrepresentations of fact) to you to get you to sign a contract; you did not find out the other party lied until after you signed the contract; you have been damaged by the fraudulent inducement; and now you want out of the contract. (The decision doesn't get into what the supposed misrepresentations were.) However, part of a court's analysis is "buyer beware", you better have done your homework, your due diligence*, before signing the contract. In this case, the appeals court said the restaurant could have found out the l...

As of this posting (August, 2017), The Founder is finally on Netflix. It's the story of how struggling milkshake-machine seller Ray Kroc came across the first McDonald's in San Bernadino, California, in 1954, which was owned and operated by the real founders, the two McDonald brothers, Dick and Mac. Kroc got in with the brothers, began franchising restaurants, and eventually bought the brothers out for $2.7 million in 1961. The movie tells the story that the San Bernadino location was the only operating McDonald's in 1959. However, a Time magazine article says there were six McDonald's franchises at the time. Either way, McDonald's, as a brand, was basically nothing in 1959. How they operated the restaurant was innovative but not complicated. And there was no IP (intellectual property) protection on what they did. You can't patent how your kitchen works or how much you sell hamburgers for. (I'm not talking about selling things you call "Big Macs...