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Nasir and Matt discuss a lawsuit involving Gordon Ramsay and his business partner. They then address the question of whether an attorney or a CPA should take priority. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: And this is our podcast where we cover business in the news with our legal twist and also answer some of your business legal questions that you’ve been gracious enough to send in to us at ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. By the way, that’s probably the best intro I’ve done this far. MATT: I was going to say, you got the email address correct. It’s like, 50-50 on that. NASIR: Yeah, that’s true. I didn’t mention the episode number. I didn’t want to take a chance of getting that wrong. MATT: Yeah. Well, we usually leave that for the end, anyways. NASIR: That’s true. We are ready to go, right? I’m interested in this first story because I just watched Hell’s Kitchen which is a show that’s terrible now but I just kept watching it and now I just seem to watch it every season. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure of mine. MATT: I got reeled in one season. I watched it. It’s all right. There’s nothing really of substance there but it’s interesting at times. NASIR: No, there’s not. It’s probably one of the worst cooking shows, too. If you’re into cooking and so forth, it’s like terrible cooks that don’t really know what they’re doing and kind of just putting it together as the season goes along. MATT: We’ll get into the actual story we have here. It’s hard to tell from the TV show because he comes off as a pretty… I mean, it’s Hell’s Kitchen. He comes off as this pretty mean guy. NASIR: Yeah, but if you watch his British version, he seems completely different. It seems like the American shows, the producers make it so that it’s geared towards an American audience – a little over the top and kind of aggressive and so forth. MATT: Yeah, exactly. We don’t know what his real personality is but maybe this story has a little bit of a reveal here. Basically, it was Gordon Ramsay and he had a business partner. We are talking about this story so there’s obviously a lawsuit involved and it’s basically his business partner is now suing him for 10 million, essentially saying Ramsay kind of conned his way around their original deal through a couple of tricks that he did – one being with the intellectual property, one being with I guess that’s more of the name situation but I don’t know if you had heard about this or you’ve read about it at all – some pretty interesting things that it looks like he’s being accused of at least. NASIR: They started this Rowen Seibel and Gordon Ramsey started this restaurant together called The Fat Cow, this LA eatery, and the problem was The Fat Cow was a restaurant named in Florida. Therefore, this Florida restaurant was, of course, upset about the name and so they filed a trademark infringement suit and this Rowen Seibel basically is saying that Ramsay mishandled this lawsuit. He even quoted him saying that he’s the trademark queen which I don’t know why he would say queen instead of king but that’s another issue. But the point is they ended up closing down the restaurant and Seibel says that Ramsay used this trademark excuse to close the restaurant and create a new one without him. Of course, it’s hard to know exactly what went on because Ramsay’s team says that Seibel is the one that managed the restaurant. But, at the same time, how do you create a restaurant name like The Fat Cow without first doing a trademark search. I mean, you know that, especially in this case where you have a restaurant that‘s going to have automatic national publicity; you may want to expand it into other locations; and you want to be able to use the name. And so, the first thing you do before you actually solidify a name is make sure you do that trademark search and it seems like that wasn’t done here. MATT: You’re exactly right,