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Trademark Registrations may now be Broadened to Account for Evolving Technology

Posted: September 25th, 2015

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has launched a pilot program to allow amendments to goods/services in trademark registrations that would otherwise be beyond the scope of current specifications.

Typically, once a trademark has been registered for particular goods/services, it is not possible to later amend those goods/services beyond the current identification. However, this does not reflect the world of rapidly changing technology – goods and services may be quickly phased out in favor of their modern counterparts. When the new technology did not match the original goods/services, the trademark owner was forced to forego the old registration and file a new application, thus giving up an earlier date of use.

Under the new pilot program, trademark owners will be able to swap out the original outdated goods/services with the updated goods/services reflecting the technology advancements. This enables the trademark owners to maintain the existing registration and extends the protections afforded by the existing registrations.

While the new pilot program allows for amendments beyond the current identification, it is not without limitations. First, the amendment is allowed only in cases where the trademark owners can no longer show use on the goods/services in their original form due to evolving technology. Also, the trademark must still be used in connection with goods/services that reflect the same underlying content or subject matter. Further, any “incontestable” status that applied to the original goods/services will not apply to the newly amended goods/services; the trademark owner will have to file a declaration of incontestability five years following the modification to the “evolved” goods/services. Lastly, although the original dates of use would remain in effect, the “evolved dates” will be noted and made of public record, which will likely raise potential priority disputes.

Below are some examples the USPTO provided of acceptable amendments:

Original Identification Amended Identification

Phonograph records featuring music Musical sound recordings

Floppy discs for computers for word processing Providing on-line non-downloadable software for word processing

Printed books in the field of art history Downloadable electronic books in the field of art history

Downloadable software for use in database Software as a service (SAAS) services featuring

Management software for use in database management

The new pilot program is good news for trademark owners as it acknowledges the need to accommodate the rapidly evolving technology in the world today. The duration of the pilot program will depend on the volume of requests. Accordingly, trademark owners who are scheduled to renew their trademarks in the near future should take advantage of this program.

CMM featured in LIBN article “Law Internships Emphasize Real-World Experiences”

Posted: September 9th, 2015

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By Joseph Kellard, Long Island Business News

When Joe Campolo, managing partner at Ronkonkoma-based Campolo Middleton & McCormick, started his law firm in 2006, the first person he hired was a legal intern from Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center in Central Islip.

That intern, Arthur Yermash, remained with the firm and is now a senior associate.

As with many other private firms across Long Island, Campolo Middleton continues to work with interns and externs during the summer and school semesters.

“We think that the firm’s interns are critical to the firm’s growth as well as to the legal education process,” Campolo said.

Each summer the firm accepts one to three interns or externs from Touro or the Maurice A. Deane Law School at Hofstra University in Hempstead, and an attorney liaison manages their workflow and has them rotate to different departments throughout the summer. The intern’s primary role is to perform legal research and write first drafts of legal briefs, motions, transactional documents and the like, providing them hands-on experience not found in the classroom.

This fall, Campolo, Middleton, & McCormick will keep two summer interns on board throughout the semester in a part-time capacity. Historically, the firm hires one intern upon completion of law school per year. The firm currently employs five former interns.

“It’s a good way for us to get a good sense of the talent pool that’s out there – folks that fit a need both in personality and work ethic and in areas where we have a need for particular legal work,” Campolo said.

While internships are mostly unpaid, not-for-credit programs that have no academic or time requirements for students, externships are for-credit and require them to perform 200 hours of work during the summer or at least 12 hours per week during the 14-week semester.

Touro and Hofstra have various internships and externships, including legal services at private firms, both large and small, government agencies such as district attorney offices, and in-house counsel at businesses, including Melville-based Canon.

Jennifer Gundlach, Hofstra’s senior associate dean for experiential education, said that when placing students at law firms, she has the students formulate goals based on what they want to learn and communicate these to the supervising attorney. Hofstra requires of students a substantial amount of legal writing and drafting, she said, and through a memorandum of understanding, the school requires participating firms to offer these opportunities.

“So maybe it’s meeting with clients or going into court with the lawyers, doing negotiations and mediation with an opposing counsel of some kind, doing client interviews or counseling clients about different issues, doing legal research memos,” Gunlach said of the tasks it wants students to learn.

Hofstra has between 30 to 60 summer interns and externs, and 60 to 80 students perform externships each semester. The school tends to place students in solo practices and small firms because they typically provide the necessary educational and real-world experiences.

Howard Gilbert owns a small firm with his son, Jason, in Melville that specializes in labor, employment and educational law and has worked with students from Hofstra and Touro for the past few years. During summer, Gilbert works with two or three interns or externs; this fall three students will work at his office.

Gilbert said he feels a heavy responsibility to give them first-hand experiences and substantive knowledge. He has them perform various duties, whether it is interacting with government officials or judges, or investigating claims with a client, writing legal memoranda or preparing motions. Gilbert and his son interact with the interns and externs on the substance of law procedure.

“Actual experience in a law firm, I believe firmly, provides interns and externs with these real-world applications of problems and disputes involving real people,” said Gilbert, who frequently recommends the students to fellow attorneys and firms.

Myra Berman, associate dean for experiential learning at Touro, said the law school’s externship program in the past year has shifted, from a focus on academic substantive law to professional development.

Touro offers two extern programs that are judicial clerkships. One is in the chambers with Judge Leonard Wexler at the Eastern District Federal Court in Central Islip. The other is with Judge Fern Fisher, chief administrative judge for the New York City courts, who places the students in various city courts.

“In the past we had externship seminars for three hours a week that dealt more with what the court was dealing with substantively, rather than the experience of being in a judge’s chambers and what it means to be a professional in judges’ chambers,” Berman said.

During summer, Touro has as many as 20 interns and externs, and up to 70 of each throughout the entire school year. Berman said that while a large number of students remain interested in criminal law, many are eager to find jobs with businesses instead of law firms. Touro is developing an in-house counsel externship for them.

Campolo has found that as the court system has become overburdened with cases, most law schools are teaching students that mediation, arbitration and business solutions are good alternatives to litigation.

“I think that’s pushing a lot more interest into corporate transactional work than there is into litigation,” he said. “Every force out there is trying to push people out of litigation.”

http://libn.com/2015/09/04/law-internships-emphasize-real-world-experiences/

Joe Campolo LIVE on LI News Radio – September 9, 2015

Posted: September 9th, 2015

Joe Campolo, Managing Partner at Campolo, Middleton & McCormick, LLP talks with LI News Radio 103.9 FM host Jay Oliver about his latest Op-Ed piece published in the Long Island Business News, “When it comes to your employees, stop complaining and start training.”

Listen Here.

When It Comes to Your Employees, Stop Complaining and Start Training

Posted: September 9th, 2015

By: Joe Campolo, Esq. email

Published In: Long Island Business News

Tags: labor & employment, management

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Much of the griping I hear from other business owners is about how the work effort of their employees is lacking. When I hear these complaints I’ll ask, “What are you doing to train your employees?” The usual response is something like, “Well I pay them and I don’t have time to train them. They either get it or they don’t.” In this scenario, it’s the business owner who doesn’t get it.

Continual training of your team is one of my greatest takeaways from serving as a U.S. Marine. Their mission is simple: Marines are at war or training for war. It is the quality of these training programs that have made the Marine Corps so successful. Young Marines who complete basic training at Paris Island are filled with esprit de corps, motivation and confidence that serves them on and off the battlefield. As business owners you can learn to motivate your team as well – by training them.

I’ve taken this lesson into my law firm today. The members of our professional team, attorneys and support staff, are constantly training in new technology, emerging areas of the law, team building, client relations and other skills they can put to work for both their own and the firm’s benefit. I view this training as a non-negotiable part of the employee experience at our firm. The benefits clearly outweigh any of the perceived negatives:

Training increases employee engagement. Training your employees helps convey that they are valued members of your company. A recent Dale Carnegie study showed that engaged employees are enthusiastic, inspired, empowered and confident—are yours?

Increased productivity. While it may temporarily sting to sacrifice an hour or two for a training session, your employees will learn skills and tactics during that session that will increase their productivity and boost production in the future.

Increased customer satisfaction. Management must be aware of customers concerns and should conduct regular training with the staff as to how to address and correct any problems. If they aren’t, then those managers should also get training on that issue. These sessions always result in an immediate bump in client satisfaction.

With these types of benefits, I recommend that every organization – no matter how large or small – implement a formal training program. Training increases employee engagement and job satisfaction, which means lower turnover and higher profits for the business.

Who’s with me?

October 1: Joe Campolo presenting at the Southampton Library

Posted: September 4th, 2015

Join us on October 1st beginning at 5:30 pm at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton, NY. Joe will discuss how to “Prepare for (and achieve) Success — in Business and in Life!” In what areas of our lives do we want to succeed? How do we get there? Join us for a talk about creating your own definition of success; the importance of trust; setting goals, and developing a plan to achieve them – both in business and in life. Reservations are appreciated. Register at www.myrml.org or call 283-0774 x523.

August 2015 Legal Brief – Firm Newsletter

Posted: August 31st, 2015

Emotional Intelligence in Negotiations

Posted: August 26th, 2015

By: Joe Campolo, Esq. email

Tags: negotiation

Effective negotiators must strike a delicate balance between being aware of emotions, yet not becoming too emotional. It’s critical to perceive and understand the emotions driving everyone at the table—yourself and your adversary. This awareness will help you understand your adversary’s thought process and, in turn, use that understanding to push the negotiation in your desired direction. The ability to identify and use emotions to your advantage during a negotiation is called Emotional Intelligence.

The Business.com editorial staff recently posted an article on Emotional Intelligence, called, “Emotional Intelligence & Negotiating: Lessons from Harvard Business School.”

To be a good negotiator, you need a high Emotional Intelligence (EI).

This is the ability to not only recognize the state of your emotions, but those of others, and allows you to respond properly to the emotional situation without getting, well, overly emotional.

High EI is essential to effective negotiations that get the best results for all parties concerned, maintains Harvard Business School professor Michael Wheeler.

Wheeler recounts the story of a contentious meeting between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the height of the competition between their two companies (even though Microsoft and Apple actually did business with one another). Jobs accused Gates of stealing what was then the new graphics interface of Windows from Apple.

If you know anything at all about Steve Jobs, you know he was not a quiet man. Gates remained calm and, rather than yelling back, replied, “I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out you had already stolen it.”

Besides being a funny retort (who knew Bill could be funny?), Wheeler notes that by keeping calm and making a valid point that neither Apple nor Microsoft has invented the GUI that Xerox pioneered, it reset the tone. Instead of escalating confrontation, the meeting calmed down and both men were able to discuss their different points of view more productively.

As Wheeler puts it, “The heart of EI is self awareness, the capacity to sense the first stirrings of anger or anxiety. That awareness, in turn, must be coupled with an understanding of what kindled that particular response…if we dig deep enough, we sometimes see that our own attitudes are the real source of visceral response.”

Keeping Your Cool in a Negotiation
Negotiations can involve heated discussions, and the difference between a deal and a deadlock is whether you can keep your cool even when emotions threaten to break the thermometer. According to Wheeler, emotionally intelligent people are effective negotiators because they:

Identify the emotions they and others are experiencing

Understand how these emotions affect their thinking

Manage emotions, either by diffusing them or intensifying them

Leverage emotional states to work towards mutually satisfying outcomes.

Wheeler’s research shows that people who are not good at negotiating tend to experience high anxiety, caused by a sense of lack of control and unpredictability about how the course of negotiations will unfold. People in this emotional state tend to respond more quickly to counteroffers, and consequently settle for less than optimum outcomes, just to get the negotiations (and associated anxiety) over with.

Okay, sometimes we can’t help how we feel. If we’re anxious about being in negotiations, we can’t just “decide” to not feel anxious. Wheeler suggested strategies to cope include:

How do you want to feel and why?
Well, ideally you want to feel confident, and one way to feel confident is to be fully prepared. Know what you want to achieve, and to what degree you are willing to compromise.

To what extent do you have to modify your own emotional state to get in tune with other attendees? Maybe you don’t want to come on too strong, or maybe you don’t want to seem too accommodating.

What can you do to put yourself in the desired emotional state?
It’s going to be different strokes for different folks. Some people listen to music (relaxing music to get relaxed, heavy metal to get pumped), others meditate, others go to the gym. Try to visualize the situation and you performing your best in that situation. Whatever you do, the goal here is to achieve a state of confident relaxation.

Take a break during the negotiations.
If things aren’t going your way or someone is irritating you, just take a break. That way you don’t respond in an emotionally inappropriate way to what’s bugging you. Use the break time to re-evaluate and consider how you can get back on the track you want

It’s not enough to identify your emotions, you must manage them.
There’s always someone who can push your buttons. Merely knowing this is the case doesn’t prevent those buttons from getting pushed. Managing how you react when those buttons are pushed determines whether you or that someone else dictates the course of negotiations and the final outcome.

For further education on emotional intelligence and the art of negotiation, you can download Wheeler’s Negotiation 360 app. While you won’t be able to negotiate the $2.99 price, the reviews are all outstanding and you should get some emotional satisfaction out of your investment.

Shifting Credit Card Transaction Liability – The Potential Impact on Your Business

Posted: August 26th, 2015

Photo courtesy of freeimages.com. By Alex Fiore

Beginning October 1, 2015, a shift in credit card security and in-store fraud liability could place unwary merchants and business owners at risk.

EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, is a relatively new form of credit card (in the United States) that utilizes computer chip technology intended to help prevent transactional data breaches and credit card fraud. In the U.S., most EMV credit cards contain the computer chips as well as the traditional magnetic stripe. If a merchant does not have a payment processing system that accepts the computer chip, payments may be processed via the magnetic stripe as usual. However, after October 1, 2015, those businesses that have not upgraded their in-store technology and processing systems to accept the computer chip portion of the card will be at risk.

Prior to the October deadline, depending on the card’s terms and conditions, the payment processor or issuer would typically be liable for consumer losses related to fraudulent transactions. After the deadline, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express have announced that the liability for chargeback related costs of fraudulent transactions will shift to party who has not adopted the chip technology.

Generally, the EMV liability shift will have the following impact:

If the business has upgraded its processing systems, the issuer will continue to bear the responsibility of counterfeit or fraudulent activity.
If the business has not upgraded its systems and a consumer presents an EMV card, the payment will be processed via the magnetic stripe only, as it had been in the past. Here, the credit card issuer will be relieved of liability and the business will be now held responsible for consumer loss.
Liability for automated fuel dispensers will remain unaffected until 2017.

EMV use is already widespread in Europe. Following suit, millions of EMV cards have already been issued to consumers in the United States, with millions more on the way. It appears that the U.S. will eventually phase out the old magnetic stripes and smart card technology will be the wave of the foreseeable future. Business owners may be hesitant to shoulder the costs of upgrading their current payment processing systems, but they should be aware that an upgrade now could mitigate exposure connected to EMV non-compliance in the future.

In an era of increasing consumer fraud and data theft, will your business be prepared for the EMV liability shift?

Importance of a Survey When Purchasing Real Estate

Posted: August 26th, 2015

Tags: real estate

on-the-fence-1388894-1279x1923 — FreeImages.com/Lee Tuck

Clients often ask when purchasing a home, “Do I really need a new survey?” My reply ninety-nine percent of the time is, “Yes!” Clients are purchasing what is most likely to be their largest asset and the survey is the blueprint of what they are purchasing. It is the way in which the title company confirms and ultimately insures the property’s boundary lines. The title company will defend the purchaser’s clear title and ownership of the property as of the date of closing.

Title companies will accept an old survey as long as it is guaranteed to a title company, even a different company than the one being used. In that instance, the title company will conduct a survey inspection before closing and compare what is physically noted at the property as against the old survey. If there is something new – for example, a fence – the title company’s survey reading will note the fence, but state that it “is not located.” That means the location of the fence is an exception to the property description on the title policy. If it turns out that the fence is not on the correct property line and creates what is know as an “out-of-possession,” there is the potential for an adverse possession claim by a neighbor.

Last year, a gentleman came to me after his real estate sale fell apart because of a neighbor whose fence encroached by six feet all along his entire backyard. The encroachment was discovered because the gentleman’s purchaser in 2014 obtained a new survey. When the gentleman purchased back in 2008, he did not obtain a new survey and used one that his seller provided from 2000. Sometime in 2002, the neighbor erected the fence, which gave that neighbor six additional feet of property all along their common boundary line. Because the gentleman didn’t get a new survey when he purchased, he never discovered that the fence encroached because he never knew exactly where the fence was located in relation to the boundary line separating the two pieces of land.

In 2014, when the gentleman wanted to sell, the neighbor’s fence had been in place for more than a decade, making it a ripe adverse possession claim. In addition, the gentleman’s title company would not have to defend his ownership of that six-foot parcel, because the location of the fence was excepted in the title policy.

Had the gentleman done a new survey in 2008 when he purchased, the location of the fence would have been known. It could have easily been addressed by removal, relocation, or getting a boundary line agreement from the neighbor. The neighbor would have no choice but to cooperate if he wanted it to keep the fence in its existing location. There would be no adverse possession claim because the fence had only been in place for six years, not the requisite ten years.

Read more: http://www.business.com/entrepreneurship/business-negotiating-tactics-from-harvard-university/