Intellectual Property Audit

All companies have intellectual property – whether they know it or not.  This intellectual property may take the form of branding that sets your company apart from its competitors; technological innovations that are patented or patentable and provide a competitive advantage in your industry or a licensing opportunity; trade secrets that must be protected to maintain their value; or copyrights that have inherent value.  An intellectual property audit (“IP Audit”) will provide you with an inventory of your company’s intellectual property assets and an assessment of how well protected these assets are.  This will provide your company with an opportunity to proactively take the actions needed to ensure that its rights are properly protected and enforceable against its competitors, allowing your company to maintain its competitive edge.

As with any other asset, IP assets should be accounted for and reviewed periodically.  Thus, the first step we would take in conducting an IP Audit of your company would be to create an inventory of your company’s IP assets.  The deliverable to you from this step in the IP Audit process would be a list of assets that identifies and categorizes each IP asset, for example:

• patents
• trademarks
• copyrights
• domain names
• trade secrets

For each IP asset, we would then review the protections that are in place, determine what is needed to continue those protections, and provide recommendations regarding additional protections that may be needed and what is needed to implement such additional protections.  When the IP Audit is complete, your company will be positioned to take advantage of all opportunities to enforce its IP rights against a competitor, enabling your company to maintain its competitive edge.

We will work with you to tailor an IP Audit to your company’s specific needs.  The first step in our process is to conduct initial interviews with the appropriate people in your organization and review relevant documentation so we can efficiently identify the areas in which IP assets exist or are likely to arise in the future.  We will then provide you with an overview of the actions needed to protect those IP assets, including any additional safeguards that may be needed to ensure that IP rights created by employees or contractors properly vest in the company.

Once you have reviewed the results of this first step and identified the assets you want us to review in detail, we will delve into the details of these assets.  Depending on the particular circumstances, this in-depth review may, for example, examine areas of potential infringement of your company’s IP assets by others.  In other circumstances, the in-depth review may involve an inspection of certain areas of your company’s operations to determine where it may need to take action to avoid infringing upon the IP rights of others.  The in-depth review may also involve a review of purchase agreements and licenses your company has with its vendors to ensure that your company is receiving adequate representations, warranties, and indemnifications from infringement claims that arise from goods and services acquired from its vendors.

At the conclusion of the IP Audit, we will provide a report detailing the status of your company’s IP assets, specific recommendations for enhancing and protecting those assets, and specific recommendations for heightening the awareness of the value of those assets within your organization and the on-going actions needed to protect both existing IP and IP yet to be developed.