Protecting Your Intellectual Property

Obtaining the Rights

The aim of intellectual property (IP) is to frustrate copiers. A strong IP position also makes it easier to attract great people to your company, increases the value of your shares and options, and makes it easier to obtain investment.

Trade Marks

Trade Marks protect your right to provide your goods or services in a distinctive way, fall on a spectrum somewhere between descriptive to distinctive, can be less expensive or more expensive depending on where and what you seek to cover, and protection depends on the market you seek to use the mark in.

We win awards for our trade marks work for some of the world’s most famous brands and can help you with this stuff.

Copyright

Copyright is an exclusive bunch of rights to your original works. We can identify your copyright works, can draft license and assignment agreements, even in employment agreements, can advise on what you need to do at the creation stage to enforce your rights and can deal with infringers.

Patents

Patents protect novel, inventive products and processes but they are expensive and contain traps. We can help with patent portfolio management, reviewing existing families of patents, helping you with your approach and we will tell you when you have had a bad idea.

Confidential Information

We can help your secrets, processes and ideas from being stolen, copied and used to compete with you. Equally important is that you do not receive information that pretends to be secret but isn’t. We can help with your internal controls, confidentiality and non disclosure agreements, non-competition agreements and restraints and with enforcement of these.

Sure, you can download something off the internet but it may enable disclosure in a way that someone can figure out how to do what you are doing without consequences.

Freedom to Operate

You need to be able to develop, make and sell your products without legal liabilities to other patent holders. Having a patent can be useless if third parties have patent coverage that dominates your patent position. We can help you review what your patents claim rather than what the product does.

This is called a freedom-to-operate (FTO) analysis and can help you both raise and save money and headaches down the track but it does not stop at looking at your competitor’s portfolios.

We can build processes to instal into the DNA of your business to avoid mistakes that may impede your ability to develop, make or sell your products, help with your hiring practices to protect your IP and make sure you have good title to your IP. The FTO process is ongoing.