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Legally Sound Smart Business by Pasha Law PC

Fight for Your [Trademark] Rights | Behind the Buy [6/8] [307]

Though things are coming along well, the journey would not be interesting if it was purely smooth sailing. After our buyer opens escrow, they are forced to push the closing date back when suddenly a letter from an attorney was received claiming the business, we are buying has a trade mark on the name!  Now it’s time to for our buyer to either back off or buck up and fight for our Trademark rights!



Full Podcast Transcript
NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is our sixth episode of Behind the Buy, in our series where we uncover the business transaction of buying a business and you get to hear the inside scoop of our calls with our client. My name is Nasir Pasha.
MATT: And I'm Matt Staub.
NASIR: This episode, there's just so much to set up here. It's pretty dense, but I think we're gonna try to do it here. In this episode, there's two phone calls. At this point, if you guys recall in episode 5, the buyer and seller have gone through some periods of due diligence, there were some hiccups there with the lease and the seller made a dumb mistake by telling the employees prematurely. But we did get past that and we actually ended up signing an asset purchase agreement after it was drafted. Luckily, as soon as you sign the asset purchase agreement, it's not like the transactions over, you still have another period of due diligence, and that's a little bit more intense than the LOI due diligence period. That's about where we are right now.
MATT: If you recall from the previous episode, we had, I think it was three different contingencies in place, so like you said, just because the agreement signed doesn't mean the transaction's done and the sellers getting paid at whatever the closing date is. What's funny about this episode is if we look back when we had that issue with all the employees finding out, that seems like it's really a drop in the bucket compared to this. This is like a grab bag of issues that came up. Listen to the call, it's just one after the other without even any transition to the next one just because there were so many things on our mind that I think just needed to get them all out there and discuss with us.
NASIR: If I recall, after that happened in the last episode and the call before, you could tell that the seller is just gonna be fun to work with to say the least. There's two calls. The first call is really short. This is basically talking about the escrow period, but the second call, I just want to set it up a little bit because it's actually set very close either a week or so before closing. Our client actually sent us an email, it was late in the night or something like that and I remember, it was relatively urgent and so Matt and I talked first and then we got on the call with our client to discuss. I just wanted to set that up a little bit. Of course, like every episode, we have some defined words that we need to go over to make sure that it doesn't go over anyone's heads. I guess that's a little insulting to say, I probably shouldn't say that, or just a reminder of certain words that maybe some people may need a reminder of.
MATT: Well yeah, it's not even just the listener, I think attorneys too with this first one indemnification clause. I'm not even sure there's a full understanding of that, but it's a very common provision that's -- I don't wanna say every contact, but most contracts, but essentially what it is is you have two parties, the indemnifying party and the indemnified party, and it's basically if there's a third-party claim made against the indemnified party, the other party then would -- I probably should not describe it like this because I'm just saying indemnify over and over.
NASIR: It sounds like a big party, but it sounds great though.
MATT: Long and the short, there's a third-party claim against one party, and then the other party to the transaction, in this case, would then have to indemnify that other party, meaning they'd have to basically become responsible or...
Legally Sound Smart Business by Pasha Law PC
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