As OG+S’s attorney licensed in Minnesota and on the heels of last week’s post about the FTC proposed rule related to non-compete clauses, I figured I should cover recent changes in Minnesota law related to non-compete agreements. If you are looking for some helpful context about non-competes, Collin’s post provides helpful context. For agreements entered into on or after July 1, 2023, Minnesota law deems non-compete clauses generally void and unenforceable. This generally includes any agreement between an “employer”
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Latest from Ogden Glazer + Schaefer Interact
Proposed FTC Rule on Non-Competition Clauses
Introduction: If you’re a small business owner, you’ve likely heard about the proposed rule by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to ban non-compete clauses. You might be wondering what this means for your business and what you should do if the rule becomes law. Let’s break it down.
Understanding Non-Compete Clauses: Non-compete clauses are those provisions in employment agreements that seek to prevent employees from working for a competitor or starting a similar business after leaving your company. This
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Taking the Good with the … Service
You may remember the CD-ROM, that vestige of a technological age mostly past by now. This was software as a good, a tangible item for sale usable in several ways. Of course, as with time, so goes with new technology: change is inevitable. Nowadays, we download, stream, and access software without even so much as a disc drive on almost any computer.
With this change comes the need to rethink trademark portfolios that contain marks covering software. After all,
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Get Out of Gator Land
I read Influence Is Your Superpower by Zoe Chance earlier this year. One of my big takeaways was a concept I had read about other places but I liked her description best. There are two processes for processing thoughts. System 1 is mostly monitors for threats and opportunities. It is mostly controlled by the amygdala, which means it is a lot of emotion and actions unconsciously and automatically. It bypasses the neocortex. She calls this Gator Brain.
Rent Never Abates to Zero and Other Tips for Tenants (again!)
I originally wrote this post in 2018. While I don’t love utilizing old blog posts, this is an important topic and the fact that more tenants don’t know their rights/get caught in these trap doors, is a personal pet peeve. With COVID dollars drying up and evictions back in person in Milwaukee County, I thought it was a good time to dust off this post and re-visit it.
In Wisconsin, there are plenty of “gotchas” or “trap doors” in
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Poking Fun or Making a Buck?
My last blog post ended with a cliffhanger: but what about Jack Daniel’s and dog toys? For those of you on the edge of your seats, thanks for waiting. There are others probably thinking, “What is this guy’s deal? First, it was shoes and socks, and now it’s whiskey and dog toys?” For those readers, I ask for a little patience. I will get to the point.
For those unaware, the U.S. Supreme Court in June issued a
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The Bar Exam, As In Life
For many recent law school grads, today is the day to sit for the dreaded bar exam. When non-lawyers ask me about the experience, they usually end up with a pained expression and tell me how glad they are to not have to do that themselves. Now that I have distance from the experience, it’s easy enough for me to say “Oh, it wasn’t so bad”—but while I was facing the prospect of sitting for it, I wasn’t quite
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Fair to Use this Trademark?
This blog post builds on my previous post. This time I will be covering fair use for trademarks instead of copyright. Much like copyright, there are exceptions and limits to what protection owning a trademark can provide you, including what is and is not infringement. Fair use in the trademark space breaks down into two categories.
The first is descriptive fair use. As Erin covered in an earlier post, trademarks are on a spectrum of distinctiveness. Descriptive
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Public Speaking: An Ability Worth Working For (Episode 2)
[Erin here: This is the second of two lessons from Carter, our outstanding high school administrative assistant. He keeps winning Gold at Wisconsin State Forensics so we think we all can learn something from him.!]
If you are reading this then I like to think that you enjoyed the first part of this two-part blog post, and you want to hear more about the rules that I think are a must to being a great public speaker. Before reading
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Public Speaking: An Ability Worth Working For (Episode I)
Picture this: You are standing in a school classroom, in front of a group of ten or eleven people. You’re about to finish a speech you had been giving for the past three months. You take a deep breath, you’re done. You go out into the lobby area of a school and wait to hear if you will win gold at State Forensics. Your results come back; you have won gold. All your hard work has paid off.
I
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Will You Trademark Me?
I get many different types of questions from my clients regarding various trademark matters. Some scenarios involve trademarks that have been in their portfolio for a while and are no longer in use, while other trademarks are brand new and ready for their moment in the spotlight. Sometimes clients wonder what to do with a trademark associated with a business they are purchasing, and other times they have a question related to a small but confusing detail associated with
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Can I See Your ID?
Remote work has boomed over the past three years. Starting in March of 2020 and until at least July 31, 2023, the USCIS has allowed virtual, remote I-9 verification instead of the required in person verifications because of COVID. On August 18, 2022, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposed the possibility of making virtual, remote verification permanent and has requested comments from the general public. Hopefully, this changes in the future, but it hasn’t yet and there will
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Authorized, Issued, and Outstanding
Very often we get questions from clients regarding “authorized” – “issued” – and “outstanding” shares and what the terms mean in the context of corporations and raising money. Below is a quick explanation of the terms; thanks for reading.
Authorized Shares means the total (read, total ever that could be) shares a Corporation can create or “cut itself into.” If you imagine a pizza, Authorized Shares are like the total number of slices the pizza will ever be cut up into. There is
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A Close-Up on Working Remotely
A recent New York Times article discussed hidden costs associated with remote work, as well as some benefits that can be intangible and thus hard to measure. I have been thinking about the ups and downs of remote work for a while— this is logical for me considering I have experienced various remote professional and academic scenarios since the onset of the pandemic, as have many other workers and students.
In this time, I have had to grapple with
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Implementation Isn’t Implied
We’ve all done it. We’ve said we are going to do something…later. Then it never gets done. We are going to go to the gym. We are going to call our mom. We are going to write that thank you card, article, novel, etc. But it doesn’t get done. Or it gets done only after oh, say, we wake up at 1:37 in the morning remembering it hasn’t been done. (Too oddly specific? There’s a reason for that.) Want
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Contract Distilling? Sure, We Can Do That!
Friday May 12, 2023 was a big day here at the office. Thanks to the efforts of City Brewing and Wisconsin Brewing Company, the Department of Revenue issued a declaratory ruling that approved contract production (through Alternating Proprietorships, or straight contract) between distilleries (and by extension and our reading of the statute, wineries too). This is huge for any distillery with capacity, as well as upstart distillers looking to dip a toe in the industry prior to committing the
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