Copyright infringement - does it have to be a solicitor?

[iheartdusty]

I have also posted this in freelance topic.

My friend has a small design business and she is plagued by people ripping off her designs and selling unauthorised copies. She just cannot afford a solicitor at £250 an hour.

Does anybody else offer a one-stop service to write a cease/desist letter, and if necessary, give advice about how to take it to court? Ideally they would collect the evidence as well.

I was thinking that it could be compared with licensed conveyancers, employment rights consultants, etc - they offer services related to legal matters without being full-blown lawyers.

She is a member of a trade design association but they don't advise members, they just have a list of solicitors.

It seems like such an obvious niche, I can't believe nobody appears to do this!

A direct access barrister is likely to be cheaper - and once she has paid for the letter/advice once, she may be able to do it herself thereafter?

Whereabouts is she? (Although whomever she uses does not need to be local to her.)

a standard cease and desist doesn't need to be sent by a lawyer at all. If she can get a pro forma done and change the details each time, she can do it herself. the difficulty here is presumably she's dealing with unregistered design rights which have fairly limited protection in terms of duration (3 yrs in europe / 5 or 10 yrs exclusive in UK) so her rights may have expired anyway, and proof of copying must be established to have a proper claim - ie someone can claim they've independently come up wtih something very similar / the same (happens a lot) so she will even need to show how they've had access to her designs prior to theirs being made available to the public.

There are a lot of good IP lawyers who operate as business affairs consulatants at probably £150 / hr but she probably doesn't want to use them for evidence collection which can be extremely time consuming and isn't necessarily going to be a legal job anyway.

You might want to have a look at this website:

simply-docs.co.uk/Copyright_Licence__Assignment_Agreements/Copyright_Cease_and_Desist_Letter

Thanks very much, all helpful responses. She is based in East Midlands, tho as you say, she doesn't need to use someone close to her.