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Are you a musical artist looking to protect your work? If you’ve ever sought copyright protection of your songs before 2021, you may remember feeling the burn of paying to register each song individually. However, there was news early last year from the Copyright Office which can help ease the financial burden of protecting your work and enforcing the rights to your music. Enter: the GRAM (Group Registration for an Album of Music) Copyright Application.  

This post continues the…
Continue Reading Copyright Office Sings a Different Tune

Compensating service providers with equity is a pretty regular occurrence with startups. New companies don’t have a lot of cash (or any) to pay the people they need to run the business (just get a quote on the cost to develop an MVP of your new app if you don’t believe me) and providing equity is a great way to build buy-in because…we know…a startup, at least from the perspective of the Founders, is a long-play, not a short…
Continue Reading Getting Over That Hurdle (Rate)

Your farm client has sold apples to a wholesaler operating as an LLC and has not been paid. Now the LLC has closed, and the owner of the LLC has filed bankruptcy. What can you do to get your farmer paid? Wisconsin has far fewer farms now than it did 40 years ago, but we are still an agricultural state. It therefore makes sense for lawyers, particularly those in rural Wisconsin, to have some understanding of the Perishable Agricultural…
Continue Reading Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act Trust Claims

As you learned from Drew’s post last week, we attended the State Bar of Wisconsin’s Solo and Small Firm Conference.  It is a conference for well, solo and small (fewer than 10 attorneys) firms. Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of discussions about teams with other attendees – especially those of us who have a dispersed workforce.  One key ingredient in having a team whether dispersed or not is trust, but it becomes even more important when people work from…
Continue Reading How trust enhances team performance

Every year, many Wisconsin lawyers who work for small firms or practice law solo attend a conference sponsored by the State Bar of Wisconsin which facilitates gatherings, lectures, and conversations about relevant topics and issues. I was excited to be able to attend this year’s Wisconsin Solo and Small Firm Conference to gain insight into approaching legal practice in this way through lectures and conversations. These in-person discussions are especially valuable to me as a new lawyer at an…
Continue Reading Three Insights from the 2022 Wisconsin Bar Solo & Small Firm Conference  

After moving to Wisconsin, I came to appreciate many things about Wisconsin culture, including the near-universal adoration of Kwik Trip. After a few visits to Kwik Trip, I realized that Kwik Trip was something I had experienced long before ever having been to Wisconsin. In my native state of Iowa, Kwik Trip had been present my whole childhood. The only difference is that I recognized it under the Kwik Star brand name. Many Wisconsinites I share this with are…
Continue Reading Quick (Kwik? Quik?) on the Draw

Below is an actual question that I have seen on Reddit, received on Facebook, and chosen not to answer on forums. But now is the time to unravel some copyright questions.

I found a crochet pattern, and I hate it. I had to re write it in different terms to understand it. How much would need to be changed in order to have a new pattern? Plenty of designers get ideas from crochet pieces they see. But they come…
Continue Reading Unraveling Copyright for Patterns

For many of us in Wisconsin, summer and fall is full of travel, recreation, and family time. That means more Wisconsinites are on the road traveling to cabins and lakes, or out hitting the trails on ATVS.

Unfortunately, family vacations also can be a dangerous when it comes to the roads, lakes, and trails. According to the American Automobile Association, summer is the most dangerous time of the year for teen drivers.

On top of that, the amount…
Continue Reading Keeping Your Family Safe on the Road Also Means Being Insured Against the Underinsured

This post is a 30,000 foot view of the process of becoming a brewery and winery in Wisconsin simultaneously. Yes, you read that right, a brewery can also be a winery or vice versa. As small producers seek to differentiate themselves and expand their market presence, clients seeking to become both a brewery and a winery continues to be an area of interest and growth. Read on for more information.

The Steps at the Federal Level

In order to…
Continue Reading Brewery & Winery? I Can Be Both?

As I said in the last blog post I enjoyed the interviews that I had with my co-workers, with them I was able to learn much about their lives and what they are all about. I also learned about what the world of law is like and how to navigate it.

As a sixteen-year-old interested in law and politics I did not know very much about how a law firm worked. Up until the moment I started the most…
Continue Reading The Amazing Workplace of OG+S: Episode II

Below is the second post from our departing summer law clerk, Karen. I am very happy that we infected her with our love of IP law! But what I am even happier about is that she gained confidence.

If you read my first blog post, you know that OG+S was my first legal job. I entered law school with the original thought of practicing Immigration Law and had never considered Intellectual Property until this summer. Over the last ten…
Continue Reading An Open Mind Opens Doors

This is the last week of work for our summer law clerk, Karen Perez-Wilson. She has been an absolute pleasure. One of her last assignments was to write two blog posts about her experiences with us this summer. This is her first post. As you will see, I think she is gunning for ice cream, too.

Hello,  

My name is Karen Perez-Wilson, I am a second-year law student at the University of Wisconsin Law School. For the last ten…
Continue Reading Ten Weeks with OG+S

A Wisconsin ski resort received a mixed decision from the Wisconsin Court of Appeals in
Schabelski v. Nova Casualty Company.1 The decision provides some important lessons regarding releases in Wisconsin, and again shows how challenging it can be to convince a Wisconsin court to dismiss a personal injury claim entirely based on a waiver agreement. Background: Experienced Skier Agrees to a Waiver, Falls from Chairlift Kathleen Schabelski went to a small, Wisconsin ski area (Sunburst Ski Resort), and…
Continue Reading Appeals Court Decision Teaches Lessons on Waiver Agreements

Erin here: The following is from our high-school employee, Carter. I swear that it is his words (with some grammatical fixes from Katie and me), and that he didn’t get told he had to write nice things. Or even a promise of more ice cream. Though with this report, I am definitely going to be sure that he gets more ice cream outings on the firm’s dime.

When I first started working at OG+S, I was told by Erin…
Continue Reading The Amazing Workplace of OG+S

This week’s OG+S blog post is not a deep dive into a legal topic. Instead, I am taking time this week to talk about a topic that is a significant one for me and many others: mindfulness. This concept has been much discussed in the recent past, largely as an antidote to an increasingly frenetic, anxious world. Daniel J. Siegel describes that “…being mindful, having mindful awareness, is often defined as a way of intentionally paying attention to the…
Continue Reading Meditating on Mindfulness in the Legal Profession

Katie is our new legal assistant. We are pretty sure that as you interact with Katie, you will realize she fits right in here at OG+S. Below, she gives a taste of what we mean by that (see: cat’s name).

I grew up mostly in Wisconsin and Michigan, I am the youngest of three children, and both of my older brothers went to UW Madison (Go Badgers!).

I am a graduate of Jackson College in Jackson, MI, where I…
Continue Reading Introducing Katie Francey