When someone starts a business, they generally have a product or service they sell that is different than other people. For example, most people have a favorite pizza restaurant. And that’s because they are all different. But if you wanted to open your own place, how could you be sure no one else could use your recipe? You work with an attorney who specializes in protecting “intellectual property”. Sisson & Banyas Attorneys at Law are well known attorneys in that field and help people protect their trade secrets, trademarks, patents, and other intellectual property. 

What’s a trademark? A trademark is words or a picture that is used to represent your brand. If you look at the items in your classroom, you will see trademarks all over the place! Amazon has a smile, Nike has a swoosh, and Crayola has the top of a box of crayons. 

Edwin Sisson got his degree in engineering and went into the plastics industry.Having created a number of products and received patents on them, Ed found the law side of the work to be very interesting. While working full time he went to law school and obtained his license to practice patent law.  Shortly after his current employer wanted to sell off a piece of their business that didn’t fit their future goals. Ed put together a plan and financing to try to buy it, and the deal didn’t work out. But after all the work, he realized he wanted to own his own business and being an attorney seemed like a perfect fit. Edwin Sisson Attorney at Law opened in 2004 and he became a full time attorney in 2005. Today, Ed and his partner Jeffrey Banyas are well known intellectual property attorneys and work with companies to protect their business around the world.

A business goes through a cycle where it starts up, grows, and then needs to transition to the next generation if it is going to keep going. We are at that point now. It is time for Ed to start phasing out and Jeffrey to take over the day-to-day business. But there are a lot of challenges with that. How do we make sure all the clients stay? How do we make sure we have the right team supporting Jeffrey? How do we help him continue to grow? And how do we help Ed step away? We are working through all of those questions and more over the next few years.

Currently about 40% of our business is outside the United States. A little under 20% is in the automotive industry with much of it based in North Carolina. So our clients are all over the world and need help being sure their property is protected everywhere.

Throughout his career, Ed has been involved in the National Association of Plastic Container Recovery organization which is concerned with the recycling of plastic containers. He helped implement the recycling triangle and was part of the industry efforts to identify the types of plastics for recycling purposes.

We work with government through the courts system. We represent people in court to argue in front of a judge if someone is trying to use our customer’s customer’s ideas or brand or defend against someone attacking our customer. We also represent our customers at the United States Patent Office where people apply for patent protection of a product they want to make. If you make a new product and want to get a patent, there are a lot of things you need to do ahead of time to help make that process easy. We do that for our clients.

We work with law schools in the area to recruit attorneys. The hard part is finding an attorney who wants to work and live in a small town and get paid what you get paid in a small town. There are lots of attorney positions in large cities that pay big salaries, but you also are expected to work long hours. In typical firms every hour that is worked for a client is recorded and then billed to that client – we call those billable hours. Attorneys are usually required to have a certain number of billable hours a year and it can be difficult to get them. At our firm, we charge our clients a flat fee and don’t require our attorneys to track billable time so we feel it is a better working environment. But we find the attorneys who appreciate that are those that have worked in a traditional firm first and then come to us.

Why do employees like to work here?

We truly value our employees and protect their time. Typical law firms have very different cultures to ours – we don’t have yelling, disrespect, or intimidation happening that can be seen at other firms. Here, we are completely transparent and seek out our team’s opinions on things. It is very unique.