E-commerce & Consumer Products

As your e-commerce business grows, so do your legal concerns. Your website, products, product descriptions, and data privacy policy must comply with the laws of the US federal government, all 50 US states, and every country into which you sell. If you run a site that allows users to post content, you need a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) policy to shield you from US copyright claims. Even if you control all the content on your site, you need to conduct trademark searches and file trademark applications to protect your brand and avoid infringement, and as you expand internationally, these searches and applications will need to be global. Moving into new territories often involves new contracts with shipping and logistics providers. You need to ensure your third-party logistics providers adhere to your customer services standards and that you get all the price breaks and favored customer status perks that should be available to high volume customers. As your volume grows, so do your customer disputes and chargebacks, which can lead to problems with your payment processors. You need a consistent, compliant return and refund policy that scales to keep chargebacks manageable.

I’m Rick Mortensen, and I can help. My in-house experience includes three years in the legal department of Overstock.com and four years in the legal department of online cosmetic company Jamberry Nails (three as the head of the legal department). In private practice, I have had several clients in the e-commerce space, ranging from start-ups to well established companies. I have experience in business to consumer (b2c), business to business (b2b), and consumer to consumer (c2c) business models as well as drop ship, core inventory, and third-party logistics (3pl) fulfilment models. I can draft your terms of use, privacy policy, returns policy, and DMCA policy; and I can create flowcharts, playbooks, and employee trainings to help you implement them. As an in-house attorney, I learned to solve problems inherent with scaling up, as I helped Jamberry Nails move into Australia, the UK, and Mexico. I learned to negotiate favorable terms with all types of partners and vendors, both in the U.S. and overseas. I also have extensive experience going after online infringers, resulting in the tendering of infringing domains and the shutdown of infringing websites.

Call or email, and let me know how I can help your e-commerce business.