2023-08-02 08:10:00
“I had chosen a good lawyer. Well, that’s what I believed. I thought I might trust him. But he left me on the day of the trial. The day my problems were going to be settled, he gave up and I lost everything”.
To be more exact, the lawyer had told him the day before the trial that he would not come. He had to be away, he said, for a business trip. But, he added, he needn’t worry: he would get a replacement and send a colleague. Except that instead of the tenor, the 34-year-old from Brussels was entitled to an intern. A trainee who fixed his appointments in a café, was paid in cash and asked for 250 euros for each consultation.
Taxi-limousine
Mohamed Ben Issa, who worked in the taxi-limousine, thought he had the brilliant idea. This was long before UberPop, Heetch and Bolt came along. Ben Issa had the project before anyone else to create in Belgium a platform for connecting drivers and customers. We were at the end of 2011. UberPop only arrived in our country in March 2014. It was indeed a step ahead. “I sensed that the future of the sector was in the digitization of mobility. I was going to develop two applications that were going to be a hit. I was quite simply ahead”.
‘Driver4you’
To put the assets on his side, Ben Issa would proceed in order, step by step. In order to legally protect his project, he generated a legal notice on his site prohibiting anyone from copying the domain and everything that goes with it, the site and the brand that he was going to call ‘Driver4you’.
In order to have his reassurances, he inquired with the Benelux Office for Intellectual Property, the BOIP. The latter assured him that his way of proceeding was sufficient both from the point of view of ownership and that of anteriority. In short: he was the first and no one might steal his idea.
“You should know that on the web, competition is terrible for keywords and domain names. We fight to find the best. And those who stand out from the others quickly gain value on the digital market” .
copiers
The time has passed. Eighteen months later, Mohamed Ben Issa noted that some, in Brussels, had not hesitated to copy it entirely without worrying regarding the legal notice that he thought he had reserved or the extension “.eu ” which he had added in order to protect it for the whole of Europe. Determined to assert his rights, Ben Issa contacted a specialized lawyer.
“Even though I’m not Coca Cola, I had digital rights and I relied on this lawyer to go to court and enforce my rights properly. I was the first. My system was original. I had I checked with the trademark register that I had done what was necessary to protect my project. My file was solid. I contacted a lawyer who, on his website, I saw was a specialist in trademarks and digital rights.”
Ben Issa was going to be disillusioned.
On the day of the trial before the Tribunal de l’Entreprise in Brussels, the lawyer gave up. He claimed a “business trip” abroad and was replaced at short notice by an intern.
Ben Issa had paid the provision of fees. The lawyer made a good impression on him. He had met him many times. He had provided him with the exhibits and documents. The lawyer rubbed his hands. “It’s a concrete file. Your case, we will win it the finger in the nose”.
Faced with the tenor hired by the opposing party, the trainee who replaced was no match for it. Mohamed Ben Issa, betrayed by his lawyer, lost his case.
New disillusionment
But he wasn’t going to give up. Ben Issa was looking for capital and raising funds. With 125,000 euros, he hoped to relaunch the project, continue the battle in court and ultimately recover the Driver4you brand.
“To achieve this, I put in the hands of the lawyer a contract of 125,000 euros. To motivate him, I promised him 10 percent. He had to carry out the case with a new domain name, ‘Iben Driver ‘, which I was going to exploit instead of ‘Driver4you’ which I had lost.”
New disappointment. “At first, the lawyer was okay with 10 percent. Then he got greedy. The ten percent wasn’t enough anymore. He wanted more. And finally, he let me down.”
There must have been an explanation that Ben Issa sought to understand. He understood everything the day he read in the press that he had come across a lawyer in the crosshairs of the prosecution. A lawyer on the margins, certainly presumed innocent but suspected of money laundering, forgery and use of forgery.
“He had of course never told me regarding his problems. I must have learned regarding it from the newspapers. You can’t imagine the shock. I’m sorry for having trusted myself. When I think back on it, his way of treating me over the leg should have alerted me. I lost everything because of him. But he hasn’t finished hearing me. I’m trying to recover what can be. I filed a complaint with the President. It is in progress. My only request is to give back my money”.
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