Legal Cheek hit with take-down notice over barrister and sheep picture

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By Judge John Hack on

Marketing managers — donchya just love ‘em. Especially po-faced examples in the legal profession

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Avid readers will recall that yesterday Legal Cheek broke a massively high-profile story of a sheep being promoted to the local Crown Court bench. It’s not something that happens every day.

His name was Shaun, and he was sweet looking little fella, who would undoubtedly improve the wider judiciary’s public image by being much more in touch than many of his counterparts with, well, agricultural issues.

A photo posted by L a w R a H (@law_walks) on

Sponsoring Shaun’s presence on the local Bristol bench were the barristers at St John’s Chambers. Indeed, we ran a photograph of head of chambers — family law guru, Susan Hunter — introducing Mr Justice Shaun to the wider community.

At the time we noted that Hunter appeared to take that task quite seriously.

Little did we realise that Hunter is a veritable Tommy Cooper relative to Rose Kemery, the chambers’ marketing manager.

Kemery wrote to Legal Cheek today to complain that the image of Hunter and Shaun was “taken from our website without our prior permission and with no copy right [sic] references used”.

The marketeer then demanded that Legal Cheek “remove this image immediately …”

Legal Cheek is tough, but it doesn’t like to mix it with the hard-boiled marketing crowd (let’s face it, these people pack jargon) — so we’ve complied.

But the legal tirade was not finished. St John’s hit Legal Cheek with more correspondence demanding that full copyright citations be detailed. So here they are in all their glory (despite the other pictures being posted by a member of the public on Instagram):

© and TM Aardman Animations Limited 2015. All rights reserved; ‘Shaun the Sheep’ and ‘Shaun in the City’ (word marks) and the character ‘Shaun the Sheep’ are trade marks used under licence from Aardman Animations Limited; ‘Shaun in the City’ is a fundraising initiative by Wallace and Gromit’s Children’s Foundation, raising money for children in hospital across the UK. Charity no. 1043603.

The naïve editorial team at LC had always assumed that the point of law sector marketing was to promote the jolly good works of lawyers. Wrong again.

On a softer side, the St John’s letter went on to encourage Legal Cheek to donate to the charity that Shaun the Sheep is promoting.

Read the email in full below:

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