FORWARD-THINKING LEGAL SERVICE, BENDING-OVER-BACKWARD WORK ETHIC.

Being nickeled and dimed by boring firms with the same tired solutions is so 2002. We’d much rather focus our energy creating cutting-edge, cost-effective, customized strategies for your legal issues.

Our lawyers are trailblazing the innovative approaches and new technologies that are changing the marketplace as we speak. They are experts across a wide array of practice areas and industries, covered in the robust-yet-handy list below:

Intellectual Property

IP Disputes

Actuate Law helps clients navigate the increasingly complicated landscape of IP disputes. We approach every dispute with a business mindset, helping our clients balance the risks and rewards of litigation. To the extent our clients end up in court, our IP litigation team is adept at handling high-stakes disputes before US federal district and appellate courts, the International Trade Commission, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, and other tribunals. Our lawyers have handled trials and hearings involving patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets, with technical experience ranging from medical devices to automotive technology. In every matter, we relentlessly advocate for our clients and help them achieve great results.

IP Counseling and Transactions

Actuate Law attorneys know that IP can be a critical component of any business transaction. Our attorneys help clients create strong and flexible IP portfolios that support their business strategies as they change and grow. We also guide clients to identify and follow pathways to market that mitigate risk from competitor intellectual property. Actuate lawyers stay by our clients’ sides through all stages of commercial transactions, whether they are considering the purchase, sale, or licensing of a product line or entire business. From the negotiating table to closing, our attorneys combine knowledge and experience with IP to help clients achieve their business goals.

Labor & Employment Litigation and Legal Counseling

Actuate Law’s team members, led by Founding Partner Doug Albritton, provide ongoing employment law counseling and litigation services to companies throughout the United States. We help ensure employers maintain compliance with federal laws such as Title VII, the FLSA (Fair Labor Standard Act), the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), the ADEA (Age Discrimination in Employment Act), the FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act), as well as related state and local statutes and regulations. We occasionally represent employees in such matters, most often in helping senior-level personnel negotiate separation agreements. We also have substantial restrictive covenants and trade secrets practice.

As a boutique law firm without the overhead and conflicts that large law firms are encumbered with, we are able to provide quick and practical advice on matters of all sizes, and for those matters that cannot be resolved, our seasoned attorneys, with significant courtroom experience across a variety of practices, can cost-effectively litigate them through trial if necessary and have done so many times. Of course, we are used to working with our client’s insurance carriers when they have coverage for these types of cases.

Common Employment Engagements

Termination/Separation Process

The most common area we consult on is how to terminate a particular employee’s employment, from documenting cause issues if such matters are presented, to how to conduct the termination process, and then resolving the separation pursuant to a separation agreement. We also have handled numerous Title VII (gender and race) and ADEA complaints, consulted on ADA matters, prosecuted and defended employee breach of fiduciary duty claims (such as property theft and customer diversion), assisted numerous executives in negotiating separation agreements

Crisis Terminations

Finally, we have experience with “crisis” terminations, where a client, which usually has been a parent company, has had to terminate numerous employees of a subsidiary because of some significant concern. In those cases we wear many hats, often overseeing third-party security companies to provide physical location and electronic security services in the days before and after the process, counseling on obligations that may be set forth in employment and shareholder agreements (including related corporate and board of director steps), reviewing contracts to change signature authority (such as in leases and bank agreements), and then in counseling parent personnel through the termination process and the final documenting of more complex separation agreements often entailing equity repurchases and the formation of litigation escrows to fund litigation, if any, arising from the terminated employees’ conduct at issue.

Litigation & Dispute Resolution

Actuate has a deep and experienced bench of trial lawyers ready to handle disputes large and small. From simple mediation to complex commercial cases and class action defense, our team of litigators are ready to assist. In addition to the traditional representation that goes along with litigation, Actuate actively leverages technology and other tools to create as many efficiencies as possible in the discovery process.

Consumer Class Actions

Commercial Real Estate Litigation

It has been our experience that significant commercial real-estate disputes are litigated further, and go to trial more often, than other commercial disputes. Doug Albritton, who leads this practice for Actuate Law, has tried five real-estate cases to verdict, and successfully defended wins from two of those cases on appeal through the appellate courts and up to denials of Petitions for Leave to Appeal that opposing parties filed with the Illinois Supreme Court. These cases include a contested seven-figure parking easement, successful prosecution of a claim arising out of an undisclosed flooding defect, enforcement of an oral agreement where the buyer undertook improvements to the property before the final purchase documents were signed, a seven-figure eminent domain jury trial and a contested radius restriction.

In addition to these trials, we have handled many matters that have settled short of trial, including disputes about lease terms, landlord failures to timely complete leased premises build outs, easements, adjacent property actions including encroaching construction and threats to shared walls, build-out expenses, and securing lease payments including from parent companies where veil-piercing permits the landlord to disregard the corporate form with corporate tenants where corporate formalities have not been respected.

Because real-estate is one of those “unique” interests that the law recognizes, early consultation with counsel is always advised because money damages often are not an adequate measure of damage, and courts, more often than in other disputes, can order real-estate transactions rescinded, and/or improvements made to a disputed parcel removed at the improving party’s expense in order to return the other party to a prior position.

Restrictive Covenant and Trade Secret Litigation

Restrictive covenants are a matter of contract, arise from employment and sale-of-business agreements, including employee stock plans and separation agreements, and generally refer to a variety of restraints including non-competes (an activity restriction), employee and customer non-solicits (which sometimes include “non-acceptance” or “no work” restrictions), customer “buy-back” terms (which may require an employee to “pay” a scheduled fee for work obtained from current or past customers), no-hire agreements (most often in staffing contracts, and preclude the hiring of staffing-company personnel), and confidentiality obligations which generally extend to “confidential information” and “trade secrets.” Such covenants with employees are enforced to one degree or another in 49 states (only California is otherwise), and in all 50 states in connection with the purchase or sale of a business. The “right to work” concept has no application to these issues.

Enforceability presents a state-law issue, the outcome of which varies state-by-state, sometimes varies depending upon which state intermediate appellate jurisdiction the case is subject to (e.g., Cook County), sometimes results in a different answer depending upon whether the case is in state or federal court (because federal courts are not bound to follow intermediate state-court appellate opinions) and, of course, is most strongly dependent upon the particular language used in the agreement (and sometimes there is more than one agreement). With the relatively new federal Defend Trade Secrets Act, or DTSA, there is now a growing body of federal law overlapping, in part, with state trade-secret law.

Given the above, and dozens of other issues too long to list in this summary, but which we deal with regularly, it should be apparent that these matters demand counsel with a broad range of counseling and litigation experience, including familiarity and tried know-how with the demands of emergency and expedited litigation or arbitration, because when litigated these cases start and finish over the matter of a few days, weeks or months, often racing through temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction hearings with parallel expedited discovery encompassing both fact and expert witnesses. Indeed, we often are called upon to prepare offensive and defensive pleadings in a few or days or less.

These matters also require counsel familiar with Electronically Stored Information (or ESI), including the ability to work with and against computer forensic experts who are more and more often hired in these matters to explore computer activity, including whether information has been copied or otherwise taken. Often, we are hired to demonstrate that such has not occurred, or to demonstrate the inconsequential effect of any challenged activity. We have extensive experience working with and against such experts, including contested court proceedings with such witnesses called to the stand. And, our general e-discovery practice enables us to remain on top of the latest ESI investigation, collection and review techniques, and the fast-changing forms in which people exchange such information including through e-mail, texts, other communication platforms and social media accounts. We have collected and reviewed information from all of them.

The single most important piece of advice we can share here is this: if there is a restrictive covenant or trade secret question, please reach out to counsel to ask. That is because the overwhelming majority of these matters resolve without litigation, after the exchange of early correspondence and negotiation conducted with the advice of counsel so that the pros, cons and business risks at hand can be assessed and balanced to reach the best outcome for you. If you do not reach out to counsel, you may act with a mistaken belief about the enforceability of the agreement at issue (maybe it is, maybe it is not), a misunderstanding of how trade-secret law interacts with these decisions even in the absence of a restrictive covenant, and, even worse, may undertake an ill-advised course of action that may prompt a lawsuit where none was otherwise in the making.