Can someone sue me as a customer service representative? I'm new to this job and it seems that a company that I work for sued a lot of customers and also many customers sued it. Some customers say to me if you didn't do it now, we're going to sue the company. My reply is like I should follow the instructions of the company and you should wait for few days. So I just follow the instructions regardless of what the customers will do as a consequence. Today, a customer told me that he will sue me personally as a part of the company. He was also recording my voice to have an evidence. I had to flow the restrictions and the instructions of the company as usual. My question is: Can someone really sue me because I'm an employee in a company? I'm not the owner. I'm just a representative. I'm an intermediate stage between (the owners, the managers, and the different departments) and (the customers). Let's make things more complicated. I'm not responsible only for delivering the correct message. In the beginning, I said to the customer wrong info because I made a typo while entering his ID into the system (the software). Then, I realized and corrected the info. Now, he has the recording that contains both wrong and correct info. Can he sue me for saying some wrong info to him in the beginning? I'm giving this case as an example but I'd like to know what happens to something like that in general. I deal with customers from different nationalities so I'd like to know what the international law says about this kind of cases or what most of the laws in the world say bout them. Answers from different countries are accepted as well especially USA.
Unless you have caused loss to the customer by making the typo, the answer is no. Obviously, anyone can attempt to sue anyone. However, for the court to accept their claim/charge for processing it needs to fall in one of these buckets: They had a contract with you personally and you were in breach of it — obviously this does not apply in your situation; You committed a crime — looks like this is not the case either; You had a duty of care towards them and committed the tort of negligence. This is what the customer must be referring to — making the typo could be regarded as negligence, especially if it caused actual harm/losses to them.
You have no legal duty to inform callers they have the wrong number. Official business is not carried out by telephone, despite the fact that some collection agencies commonly use the tactic that there is service of process forthcoming, or some other legal jargon, to entice a callback. From a non-legal perspective, you may want to call and tell them to take you off their call list and that they have the wrong number; otherwise, they are likely to continue to bother you day and night. It appears to be either a scam or a collections attempt.
UK: For all I know you cannot be fired unless you are hired. They must hire you. Once a job offer is made and accepted, they must hire you. If they don't, call a lawyer. I personally know someone who got hired, and when he arrived for his first day's work at the new company, he found that the whole department that he was supposed to join had been laid of. The company had to hire him. PS. "Financial difficulties" means you call a lawyer urgently. Once they are bankrupt your chances of extracting money are not good.
An Estonian company can be sued under French law for violating French law in France, and so can its officers, no matter what their nationality or where they reside. So yes, you could be sued in France as an officer of the company. If you have assets in France, a French judgment against you will be easier to enforce than one against someone who has no assets in France. This is, similarly, not about nationality but about the location of your assets. A suit could also be pursued in Estonia. If the activities in Estonia are contrary to Estonian law then you could also be sued in Estonia as an officer of the company. We frequently have questions about &quot;which law applies&quot; for cases that span multiple jurisdictions. The general answer is that all law applies. An activity in multiple jurisdictions must comply with the law in every one of them. If you are doing something that is prohibited (or even that possibly might be prohibited) in either Estonian law or French law, you should take professional legal advice. Unless you can find a lawyer who is qualified in both countries, you will need two lawyers.
To my knowledge there is no actual law requiring a provider to file anything on your behalf. Most do it as a courtesy but if you read the terms of service that you almost certainly agreed to, it will say that YOU are the responsible party. If the insurance company doesn't pay, even if the provider doesn't submit a claim, the responsibility is still yours. There is nothing stopping you from filing your own claim using whatever forms or procedures that they have established. I'll also note that many provider networks have rules that providers must adhere to in order to remain in that network. Some may include language about timely filing of claims but that is in no way universal. These days many providers have taken to billing the patient the full amount immediately and then will issue a refund to you if/when the insurance pays.
The store is, as far as i can see, not using the trademarked image to sell their cake. Your family does not intend to sell anything at all. This photo, from the description, could not reasonably be confused with an official image from the trademark holder. (all of this is based on your description, of course). Therefore, the trademark holder probably won't sue for trademark infringement, even if they somehow heard of this event, and if they did sue, they would quite likely lose. You would be making a copy of a presumably copyrighted image. You might have an active defense, but that is very hard to be sure of in advance. (Note that "fair use" is a very specifically US legal concept, and would not apply in the UK. The roughly comparable concept is "fair dealing" but that is more restrictive, and follows somewhat different rules.) In any case, it is possible that the rights holder would sue, and if the situation were a bit different (the was only one person pictured, making the shirt with the protected image very prominent, for example) there might be a larger chance of such a suit being successful. No business is going to want a bakery department manager deciding whether a particular use of a particular image does or does not infringe IP rights, and whether it does or does not expose the business to significant risk. Just to get an opinion from their lawyer on whether this image infringes would probably cost them several times the price of the cake with image printing. The store has no doubt written its guidelines to err well on the side of caution, because one suit, even if they won, would cost far more than the profits of many cakes, and if they lost, could have a very negative effect on their bottom line indeed. The store is entitled to restrict what business it does to keep itself safe from lawsuits. It is going to keep well on the cautious side, in all likelihood, and so it should. I fear you will have to find a store with a different policy, or use a different picture.
Yes, you do. But you should not base your claim primarily on copyright, but just on the license contract you agreed to. It's typically much easier to prove that a party did not fulfill its part of a sales contract (here: Pay the agreed amount) than to prove violation of a copyright you own. Also, you then only need to sue one guy, and not care about every platform your game might be hosted on. This is particularly difficult here, since they have not done anything wrong. It's not their fault that the publisher didn't properly pay the programmer. They (very likely) got their copy of the game legally. For details, you should consult a lawyer. We can't give you detailed legal advice.
Is this work for hire? There is an arguable case to be made that you are an employee for copyright law purposes and, if so, the copyright belongs to the company. The closer an employment relationship comes to regular, salaried employment, the more likely it is that a work created within the scope of that employment will be a work made for hire. But because no precise standard exists for determining whether a work is made for hire under part 1 of the definition in section 101 of the copyright law, consultation with a lawyer may be advisable. Second, if you do own the copyright, there is clearly an implied licence with the company to allow them to use it. It is arguable that the licence is exclusive since the software is bespoke and made specifically for the company. Can you sign an agreement now Yes, but … It is clear that the purpose of signing the agreement is to screw the company over (with the compliance of 2 of the directors). That’s a contract entered into in bad faith and possibly for an illegal purpose and would likely be found invalid. You need to understand that the company is a distinct legal entity from its owners and it has its own rights. People make the mistake of thinking the owners are the company: they aren’t. The two rebel founders are on dangerous legal ground. Assuming they are the directors of the company, they have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the company. That is, they must put the company’s interests ahead of their own. It is clearly not in the company’s interest to have a rival business start so they cannot plan to do that while they are directors - they need to resign first. You are not so much at risk - as an employee/contractor your duty is to follow the directions of the company (the company - not a faction within the company). However, if you aid the other two in what might be a crime, you could be in trouble.