Losey PLLC

08/18/2024

Losey PLLC is proud to announce that nine of our attorneys have been recognized in the 2025 edition of Best Lawyers in America®. Adam Losey for Commercial Litigation, Corporate Law, and Electronic Discovery and Information Management Law; Catherine Losey for Employment Law - Management; Ralph C. Losey for Commercial Litigation, Electronic Discovery and Information Management Law, Employment Law - Management, and Information Technology Law; Vincent A. Citro for White-Collar Criminal Defense and General Practice; Karen Middlekauff for Family Law, Family Law Arbitration, and Family Law Mediation; Joseph E. Foster for Litigation in Commercial, Banking and Finance, Bankruptcy, Real Estate, and Mortgage Banking Foreclosure Law; Lynne M. White for Real Estate Law; George R. Coe for Commercial Litigation; and David A. Meek II for Commercial Litigation.

Best Lawyers recognitions are compiled based on a Purely Peer Review® evaluation. Lawyers are not required nor allowed to pay a fee to be listed. For the 2025 edition of The Best Lawyers in America®, more than 23 million votes were analyzed, which resulted in more than 80,000 leading lawyers included in the milestone 31st edition.

08/18/2024

From our own Ian Johnson, The FTC finalized updates to its rules regarding use of consumer reviews and testimonials on August 14, 2024. The FTC’s stated goal is to address issues surrounding fake or fraudulent reviews. The rule reiterates that reviews should come from real customers and reflect those real customers’ experience and opinion with the product(s) or service(s) reviewed. The Commission points out that this means using reviews generated by AI is considered fraudulent practice and may result in enforcement action against an offending business.

The rule contains two other notable provisions.

The first is that businesses are prohibited from providing compensation or other incentives that are contingent on a customer writing a positive or negative review. A company cannot, for example, offer a 20% discount for writing a 5-star review. This does not prohibit incentivized reviews entirely, and does not prohibit all testimonials provided in exchange for free product samples. However, the Commission noted that even implied incentives may violate the rule, such as “Get 20% off for telling everyone how much you love our product.”

The second is that the rule prohibits selling or buying fake social media indicators such as likes, follows, or reposts. This rule applies to buying social media indicators that the company knows or should know to be fake. This means that companies should carefully evaluate any social media marketing partnerships to ensure these vendors are not providing false indicators.

The rule contains several other elements and a summary from the FTC can be found here.

The Federal Trade Commission today announced a final rule

05/19/2021

We recently updated our website with blogs on Florida's COVID-19 Liability Shield Law and an update on Florida Sales Tax Law. https://www.losey.law/intelligence

07/17/2020

Thank you Losey PLLC for another year of your generous donation. Losey PLLC

06/24/2020

We are excited to feature Catherine Losey as our next attorney spotlight! Catherine is the founder and managing partner of Losey PLLC. She regularly represents companies on workplace legal issues. Her experience includes the representation of Fortune 50 companies and individuals at all stages of litigation in state, federal, and administrative forums. She represents clients in a wide range of industries, including health care, hospitality, staffing, technology, national retail, banking, and other financial services. Her diverse workplace litigation experience includes representation of management in national class and collective actions. She has represented clients in investigations brought by governmental agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Labor, State Attorney Generals’ Offices, and the National Labor Relations Board. To read more about Catherine click below: https://www.losey.law/catherine-losey

06/19/2020

Please join Catherine Losey for this Legal Roundtable on June 23rd.

What will business in Central Florida look like as the region begins to move out of the COVID-19 pandemic? Join us for a free webinar and legal round table to address this and more on June 23rd, at 10 am. Panelists include Ronni Bitman (Bitman O’Brien & Morat PLLC), Doug Starcher (Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP), Jay Van Heyde (Dean Mead Attorneys at Law), and Catherine Losey (Losey PLLC). Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0uc-mppj8oGdRl7sp5eMOvBvvghQZjN8Zg?fbclid=IwAR3t3EBZK9dsLfiDmC1TwUStiIdHv_gy1RJlT-RRsbkrIjPj2YYMIWybuPs

06/01/2020

Karen Middlekauff, our family law attorney, will present a CLE to the Orange County Bar Association's Estates, Trusts and Guardianship Committee on Monday, June 8, 2020 about prenuptial agreements. Her presentation is called "Pitfalls and Problems with Prenuptial Agreement Preparation - and How to Help your Clients Prepare One Pleasantly!" Register to attend at the link below.

The Estate, Guardianship & Trust Committee presents: Pitfalls and Problems with Prenuptial Agreement Preparation - and How to Help Your Clients Prepare One Pleasantly Description: This presentation educates estate planning professionals regarding the prenuptial agreement process, how to advise clien...

05/27/2020

We are excited to feature Kelly Robinson as our first attorney spotlight! Kelly provides practical and proactive legal advice to entrepreneurs, small businesses, and growing companies. She draws from her expertise as the former in-house counsel of a premium brand to anticipate and efficiently address a broad range of legal risks. Kelly is particularly focused on intellectual property matters including trademarks, copyrights, and licensing, and has developed cost-effective enforcement plans targeting counterfeit products, infringing domains, and problematic e-commerce platforms. Her practice includes advertising, marketing, and sponsorship law, as well as compliance applicable to cause-related promotions and social media. She reviews, negotiates, and drafts a variety of commercial agreements including professional service agreements, vendor contracts, distribution agreements, and NDAs. We are proud to have Kelly as apart of our team. To read more about Kelly click below: https://www.losey.law/our-people/29-our-people/88-kelly-robinson

04/09/2020

The Federal Reserve has approved $2.3 trillion in new economic initiatives designed to provide support to households, businesses, and local governments impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. One such initiative is the Main Street Business Lending Program which is designed to help small and mid-sized businesses during this time. Through this program, the Federal Reserve will provide loans to companies with up to 10,000 employees or less than $2.5 billion in revenue last year. These "Main Street" loans would be four-year, low interest loans for a minimum of $1 million with principal and interest payments deferred for a year.

The Federal Reserve is partnering with eligible banks to offer new Main Street loans or increase the amount of existing loans. The proposed term sheets for these loans can be found on the Federal Reserve’s website at this link.

Additionally, businesses must also follow the same compensation, stock repurchase, and dividend restrictions that apply to direct loan programs under the CARES Act.

The program is not yet final and will be open for consumer and industry feedback through April 16, 2020.

The Federal Reserve on Thursday took additional actions to provide up to $2.3 trillion in loans to support the economy. This funding will assist households and

03/22/2020

Friends, quite the week; we have seen rapid legislation and a great deal of well-meaning but inaccurate information from otherwise credible news sources on COVID related legal and business issues.We spent Friday and Saturday putting together as concise of an update as we could muster in the below. One of the great challenges over the coming weeks will be adapting to rapid changes in law and business practices. We are here to help with that. You are welcome to share this information as you like.

Families First Coronavirus Response Act: This is a dense piece of legislation- we have been in contact with the Department of Labor regarding some ambiguities in this bill, and have created a concise analysis of the same as well as what they told us via telephone- if you run a business or want to know about this bill we suggest you review the analysis on https://www.losey.law/intelligence.

Emergency Funding: Given the rapidity of the economic impact, many companies are in need of emergency funding.

While this will not make a dent in the issue for medium and large companies, individual states have loan programs popping up. Florida has one for loans for $50,000, although loans of up to $100,000 may be made in special cases as warranted by the needs of the business, and loans will be interest‐free for the term of the loan (one year) and the interest rate will be 12% per annum on the unpaid balance thereafter, until the loan balance is repaid in full. They have already funded several loans. More information from the State of Florida is available at https://floridadisasterloan.org/ or 1-866-737-7232, or let us know if you need any assistance. We are recommending getting these in ASAP as the funding is rapid and the queue is growing.

There is a separate Federal Small Business Administration Disaster Loan Program that provide low-interest working capital loans of up to $2MM to small businesses and nonprofits affected by the coronavirus in presidential and SBA-declared disaster areas, with more information at https://disasterloan.sba.gov/ela or 1-800-659-2955.

We expect further federal legislation to pass this week providing for more emergency economic relief. This may happen as early as tomorrow, Monday March 23- the Senate is moving at warp speed so far. While it is still evolving here is a two-and-half page listing of Act as-is: https://www.rubio.senate.gov/…/8EE9BBAACAF810E3D500A1C48D9F…

Cybersecurity. We have seen a marked increase in malicious actors social engineering or penetrating business systems as a result of the rush to work-from-home, and a marked decrease in the ability of the private sector to address and mitigate successful attacks. Two simple steps will go a long way- ensure you (1) are using multi-factor authentication for all your systems where possible, and (2) utilize a VPN connection where possible. You will continue to see increased cyber-predation and keep your guard up.

Court Systems and Litigation: We have seen a number of state and federal court orders limiting access to courts and restricting non-emergency matters. We expect more closures and potential inability to access Court systems other than for emergency matters in the short-term. If you need to file or otherwise have access to Court systems, time is of the essence this coming week.

03/17/2020

The State of Florida has set up an Emergency Bridge Loan Program for Small Businesses Impacted by COVID-19. Loans are for $50k, although in some circumstances may go up to $100k, and there are requirements to apply.

Subject to conflicts and availability, we will offer pro bono legal assistance to small businesses needing assistance with their application. We are partnering with several other firms and attorneys to offer assistance; thus we may provide your information to another firm or attorney who has agreed to be part of this effort.

Lawyers willing to assist can email [email protected] to be added to the roster.

Businesses seeking assistance can email [email protected] and we will respond as soon as possible.