Sales Representative Lawyer
If you’re in a sales, distribution or franchise business, you’ve found a law firm with the experience and insight to understand your business needs. For more than 20 years, Clay Taylor and his team have represented:
- independent sales agents
- brokers
- dealerships
- distributors
- franchise clients
Fundamentally, our clients’ business is to create markets for other people’s products, and to understand our clients’ business, we have to understand how they bring these products to market.
Think your business is too big, too small or too specialized for us to handle? Think again. While we won’t say we’ve seen it all, we have seen a lot. Our sales clients sell everything from complex computer systems to OEM automotive assemblies, and from food ingredients to fashion apparel and footwear. We have litigated broker claims involving such diverse companies as IBM, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Calvin Klein, Eddie Bauer and FUBU.
There is a good reason why more than 30 states have enacted sales rep legislation. It’s because the commissioned sales business can be very tough. Our clients advance their time, money, effort and buyer relationships in order to open doors for manufacturers—and they get paid last. We understand this and have experience with a wide diversity of rep protection laws. We put that knowledge to work for you, standing up to companies who take advantage of sales reps. Our experience includes handling unjustified terminations and territorial disputes by manufacturers, as well as recovering unpaid commissions.
For franchise clients, we realize that owning a franchise business presents many unique challenges, and we can help. We can help you with everything from buying a franchise and negotiating the franchise agreement to unwinding an unsuccessful franchise relationship. We routinely guide troubled franchise owners through the minefield of issues they confront when leaving a franchise system.
Representing stocking distributors is also an important part of our practice. Did you know that several states have enacted laws that grant distributors territorial rights and regulate the terms of how a manufacturer terminates a distributor relationship? Our distributorship clients look to us to help them make sense of these and other issue such as: exclusivity rights, selling competing products, maintaining a dealer network, advertising co-ops, trademark use, licensing and promotion of product sales. We also help our distribution clients navigate other complex issues such as lease negotiations, secured lending and employment matters.
Regardless of whether you are a sales rep, a broker, franchise owner or distributor, we bring to each representation the unique perspective of having charted a course for hundreds of similar businesses through some of the riskiest and most trying ordeals they face.