Arizona law firm, Lerner & Rowe PC (L&R) is a widely recognized personal injury law firm in Arizona, with over 100,000 clients since 2005. That recognition as a brand comes at least in part by spending over $100 million promoting and advertising its trademarks through radio, television, print publications, billboards, and other marketing materials. A competing law firm, Brown Engstrand & Shelly LLC, using the brand name Accident Law Group (ALG), was founded in 2015. ALG purchased Google AdWords that were shown when people searched for “Lerner & Rowe”, the federally registered trademark of their largest competitor. When potential clients searched for Lerner & Rowe by name, Accident Law Group’s ads would prominently appear.

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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a final rule in April that will invalidate existing non-compete agreements and non-compete clauses in agreements. Part of the justification for issuing this rule is that employers can protect their intellectual property through non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and trade secret law: “[T]he Commission finds that employers have adequate alternatives to non-competes to protect these interests, including trade secret law and NDAs, and that these alternatives do not impose the same burden on competition as non-competes.”

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In this episode of Leveraging Inspiration: The Inspired Patent Podcast, we will discuss what you are protecting, the value of what you are protecting, and separating that value into two parts. The first thing we need to address is that intellectual property is actually property. Property law protects it. You can either exclusively own it or share ownership with others. However, the emphasis in property law is usually on exclusive ownership.

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