Our agreement to make Evia Law the firm they find when they search for a patent — or trademark — litigator on contingency.

1 Our goal

Our whole goal is to make you happy — and the surest way we know to do that is to be crystal clear from the start, so nothing about this engagement ever comes as a surprise. That's all this agreement really is: the two of us, on the same page, in writing.

Your goal is specific, and we want it stated plainly here so we are both measured against the same thing: put Evia Law in front of inventors and companies anywhere in the United States who want to enforce a patent and are looking for a firm that will take the case on contingency or a hybrid fee — and, with equal seriousness from day one, trademark infringement. As Jessica put it on our September 1 call: people mix patent and trademark up all the time, and you want both — so the kickoff keyword plan weights both lanes. Your hourly work comes from referrals; search and AI are where the contingency client looks, so that is who this program targets.

Positioning matters as much as ranking. Your flexible-fee story is presented so it stays approachable to inventors and never reads as anything that would give your premium hourly clients pause.

2 What we're doing — two surfaces, one program

You've chosen the Complete program, which is Option 1 and Option 2 from your proposal run together rather than side by side. Every asset is written once and formatted to work on both surfaces.

3 Month one — the Foundation Setup ($1,500)

During month one we run a separate, one-time Foundation sprint alongside the monthly program — so the monthly retainer funds the program, not the cleanup. The sprint is a one-time $1,500, invoiced at signing and due on receipt, and it covers:

• Removing the leftover placeholder blog posts still live on evialaw.com — the unfinished “lorem ipsum” pages we found in the audit.
• Technical cleanup — crawl and indexation health, sitemap, redirects, and anything else in that sprint that is quietly hurting trust.
• Search Console and analytics attribution set up and monitored, so from here on we are measuring against your own first-party data rather than estimates.
• The structured-data graph — firm, both attorneys, services and articles — built and validated.
• Six directory correction submissions — Best Lawyers, Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Super Lawyers and your state bar — starting with the previous address still showing on your Super Lawyers profile.
• Your two cornerstone pages drafted — the Contingency-Fee Patent Litigation page and the Patent Infringement Attorney page.

The $2,000 monthly program and its billing start at signing (sections 10 and 15). The Foundation sprint runs through month one alongside your first monthly content. These two cornerstone pages don't exhaust the month-one work on the trademark side — the kickoff plan sets both lanes' first targets.

4 What you receive every month

Here is what $2,000 a month buys, item by item. No black boxes. Where an item has a number attached, that number is the monthly amount included — not a minimum and not a cap we quietly exceed.

Content — two to four assets a month

Two to four content assets each month — four in a standard month — each written once and formatted for both Google and the AI engines. Typically that is two money pages or articles and two Q&A answer assets; interview-heavy or long-form months may run two or three larger pieces instead, and we agree each month's count and mix with you in advance at the monthly call. Money pages come first — Patent Infringement Attorney and the contingency-fee page — then the education clusters: damages, statute of limitations, claim charts, “do I have a case.” A content asset is a substantial page, typically 1,200–2,200 words. That is an editorial range, not a rule. Every piece carries an attorney byline, a last-reviewed date and source notes. Patent and trademark receive equal strategic priority in the monthly roadmap; the precise asset mix follows search demand and the kickoff-approved plan.

On-page and answer-format work

• Up to 2 existing pages a month optimized for the target keyword.
• Up to 2 key pages a month restructured into the answer-first format AI engines can quote — direct answer up top, question-shaped headings, internal links.

Technical SEO

Up to 2 implementation hours a month on speed and Core Web Vitals, crawl health, Search Console monitoring and redirects. Anything that needs access we don't hold, we coordinate with you or your host.

Link building and entity building — run together

• 10 qualified outreach targets a month — legal directories, IP trade press, bar journals, law-school and alumni channels, podcast and interview placements.
• Entity work — the six named profiles above are submitted at onboarding, and we keep those six consistent from then on — one name, one address, one practice description everywhere AI engines look. We submit corrections; approval rests with each directory.

We pitch; editors and directories decide. So what we promise is the outreach, and a report of every placement earned. What we never do is buy links, use link farms, or anything Google's spam policy names.

AI access plumbing

Verified robots.txt and firewall access for the crawlers the AI engines use — OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot — plus Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow. Access makes you eligible to be cited. Selection always stays the engines' call, and nobody can promise otherwise.

The lead-qualification flow

We build a qualification flow on the contingency page so the website does the first pass. You cast the wide net, and the enquiries that reach your desk have already been through that filter — which questions it asks, and what it screens out, is yours to set.

Reporting and calls

• One plain-English report a month.
• Rank tracking on up to 40 keywords, reported against a fixed panel.
• A fixed 25-prompt panel run monthly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI under a consistent methodology — same prompts, same settings, screenshots kept, with brand mentions counted separately from actual citations, and a sentinel subset run twice to expose variance.
• Google's and Bing's own AI-performance reports where available, and inquiries attributed where technically observable — forms, calls, referral data.
• A unified dashboard: rankings, AI citations and inquiries in one place.
• A monthly strategy call with Victor, and a quarterly strategy session with both of you.

5 How the work runs

We start with a kickoff

Before anything is built, we hold a kickoff meeting to walk the keyword plan together — the pages we'll target first, across both the patent and trademark lanes — so we're aligned before the first draft is written.

Where the writing comes from

Content is written from your expertise, not invented. We start from a short interview or an emailed Q&A with you, draft it, verify every citation, then bring it to you. You review, we revise in one consolidated round, you approve, we publish.

Your sign-off — and the deemed-approval window

Nothing publishes without your approval, which can be express or deemed. For purposes of this agreement — building on the deemed-approval process we discussed on the September 1 call — it works like this: when we send you a routine content asset for review, a five business day window starts the day we send it. If we don't hear back, the piece is deemed approved and scheduled — that cadence is how the program stays on track. Later edit requests are always welcome and enter the normal production queue. Two firm limits: deemed approval applies to routine content assets only — directory submissions and any piece containing fee claims, case results or comparative statements always require your express attorney approval and are never deemed approved. We keep a dated copy of every published version for your advertising-records file.

How we use AI, plainly

AI accelerates our research and our first drafts — it is how the keyword research in your proposal was produced overnight. We verify every source ourselves, and legal substance is always yours to approve — expressly for the flagged categories above, and through the review window for routine pieces. That is the whole arrangement, stated openly.

6 Attorney advertising & legal substance

Everything we publish for you is written with attorney-advertising rules in mind: fee descriptions stay case-specific, cost responsibility is disclosed, and national-representation language accounts for local-counsel practice.

We are not your lawyers and we don't give legal advice. You are the final authority on every word of legal substance, including whether a page complies with the rules of the jurisdictions you practise in. Section 5's approval process — including the rule that flagged legal-substance pieces are never deemed approved — exists precisely so that judgment is always yours.

7 What we need from you

Your part stays light — that's deliberate. Specifically:

• The kickoff meeting, scheduled within the first week — the keyword plan waits on it.
• One approver — a single person who can say yes, so approvals don't stall.
• Site access — and access to Search Console, analytics and your directory profiles where corrections are needed.
• Roughly an hour a month of attorney review, plus a short interview or emailed Q&A when a new piece starts.
• Your monthly call with Victor.

If something only you can give us stalls — access, an interview, a flagged attorney sign-off — that work queues rather than publishes, and we'll tell you when that's happening rather than let it drift quietly. Routine content review follows the deemed-approval window in section 5.

8 What we guarantee — and what we don't

We guarantee the work: delivered and reported, every month. Every recurring item in section 4, at the monthly amounts stated there, with a written record of what shipped.

Five honest exceptions, so that promise means something: items marked “up to” are a monthly allowance, not a quota we pad to hit; the one-time work in section 3 and the six onboarding profiles happen once, not monthly; if an item that needs your input stalls — the kickoff, access, an interview, a flagged attorney approval — that work queues, as section 7 says; and if a payment is missed, publishing and outreach pause under section 10. We are also not accountable for a delay caused by something neither of us controls — an outage, a platform change, an event outside our reasonable control.

What no honest agency guarantees, and we won't either: rankings, AI citations, traffic or case volume. Google decides rankings. The AI engines decide citations. Your market decides how many inquiries a given month brings. Anyone who promises you a number is guessing.

We also want one expectation set plainly, because it was in your proposal and it should be in your contract too: this is a low-volume, extreme-value niche. Our planning assumption at maturity is qualified inquiries in the single digits per month, not hundreds. Whether that math works is a judgment only you can make against your own case economics. Our job is putting Evia in front of the right cases so you get to make it.

Estimates from third-party tools — Ahrefs volumes, difficulty scores, competitor ratings — are estimates, and we report them as such. We validate against your own Search Console data once it's live.

9 The six-month checkpoint

The month-12 objective we are working toward is a measurable, growing share of visibility across those agreed panels — so that when someone looks for a patent or trademark litigator on contingency, Evia Law is in the conversation.

10 Term, billing and cancellation

This is a month-to-month retainer. There is no long-term lock-in.

• The $1,500 Foundation Setup is one-time, invoiced at signing and due on receipt.
• The $2,000 monthly retainer starts at signing through the secure checkout, billed monthly in advance. The Foundation sprint runs through month one, and your first content is drafted alongside it.
• Either of us can cancel with 30 days' written notice. Email counts as writing.
• We finish and hand over the work already paid for in the current month. We don't refund a month already worked, and we don't bill you for months after the notice period.

If a monthly payment is missed, publishing and outreach pause until it's resolved — we'll email you before anything stops, not after.

11 Your existing maintenance plan

You are already a maintenance client of ours at $50 a month for evialaw.com. That plan is separate, unchanged, and continues exactly as it is. This agreement sits on top of it and does not replace it.

12 Ownership & rights

Everything we create for you belongs entirely to you once it is paid for — the pages, the content, the structured data, the keyword and prompt panels. We retain no rights to it and won't reuse it for another firm. If you ever leave, it all goes with you, along with the reporting history, and we'll help hand it over cleanly. We do reserve the right to describe the engagement in our portfolio and case studies.

We work as an independent contractor, not as your employee, and we're responsible for our own taxes, insurance and equipment. Your domain name stays registered in your name and under your control throughout — we never take ownership of it.

Both of us keep the other's non-public information confidential, during this engagement and after it ends. That obligation is real and we want to be precise about its two edges:

• AI tools. We do not put client names, matter facts, or anything you have told us in confidence into an AI tool. What goes in is public-domain research and drafting instructions. If we ever want to do otherwise, we ask you first.
• Portfolio and case studies. We may say that Evia Law is a client and describe the search work in general terms. Anything more specific — a matter, a result, a named client of yours — we ask you in writing first, and you can say no.

Either of us may disclose the other's information if the law requires it, after telling the other party where we're permitted to.

13 Copyright & what you warrant

For any text, images, logos, case descriptions or trademarks you send us to publish, you confirm that you either own them or have permission to use them — including any client consent required before a matter is described publicly — and you agree to hold us harmless from any claim arising from those materials, or from anything you specifically direct us to publish.

That runs the other way too: for anything we write or source for you, we confirm it is our original work or properly licensed, and we'll hold you harmless from a claim that it isn't. Approving a draft we wrote does not shift that to you.

We deliver our work in good faith and stand behind it. We are not responsible for infrastructure we don't manage — your email service, your registrar, third-party systems you connect later — or for changes made to the site by anyone other than us. If something outside our scope breaks, we'll help you sort it out, but it isn't covered by this agreement.

14 If something goes wrong

We'd rather set this out now than argue about it later, and we've kept it short.

Neither of us is responsible to the other for indirect or consequential losses — lost profits, lost business, a case that didn't come in. And our total responsibility to you under this agreement is limited to the fees you paid us in the three months before the problem arose. That limit does not apply to the confidentiality promises in section 12, or to either side's hold-harmless in section 13.

This agreement is governed by the law of the State of California, where Thomas Digital is based. If a dispute comes up, we both agree to get on a call and try to sort it out before anyone does anything formal.

If any part of this agreement turns out to be unenforceable, the rest of it still stands. This page, together with the proposal it confirms, is the whole agreement between us — and where the two differ (as they do on billing start, monthly content count and the approval process, which we updated together on the September 1 call), this agreement controls. Changes to it are made in writing. Notices go to jessica@evialaw.com for you and victor@thomasdigital.com for us.