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Why You Must Safeguard Your Company’s Intellectual Property | Attorney Advice

BY: ,

Skull

 

Terence Church, Attorney at Law

Terence N. Church & Associates

www.TChurchLaw.com

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Why You Must Safeguard Your Company’s Intellectual Property

Some time ago, I represented a famous sports celebrity who had lost a fortune’s worth of valuable jewelry to a hotel thief. She thought she had protected herself by carefully hiding them in suitcase in her hotel room. My client could have used the hotel safe behind the front desk, but she opted to simply hide them herself. After all, she had done this many times before and had never had a problem. This time she wasn’t so lucky. The thief hit paydirt on his first try!

The lesson is simple and applies equally to today’s corporate world: It’s crucial to use the right tools to protect your jewels. In the information age of today, the jewels are different, but the principal is all the more fitting.

Today’s jewels are your company’s intellectual property — know-how, branding, documentation and coding. The secret sauce. These are the life blood of a knowledge-based company. Left unprotected, they can easily vanish and take with them the hard-earned value of your company. It can happen without your even knowing it.

Don’t Overlook These Important Steps

Get and keep signed NDAs. All prospective customers, vendors and contractors should sign confidentiality or non-disclosure agreements, otherwise known as NDAs. These agreements are very common, and most partners will sign them as a matter of course. But they are absolutely essential to protect your trade secret rights, which are the most common form of protection and the easiest to lose.

Many companies keep printed forms available which can be quickly signed at even the most impromptu meetings. The hard part is keeping a record of them. Go low-tech; keep them in alphabetical order by partner name in a three-ring binder.

Claim your trademarks and service marks. Trademarks are about protecting the brand which supports your reputation and good will. If you want to build brand name value and loyalty, you must make sure none of your competitors can use your brand. To protect against loss of this valuable asset, you must do two very important things.

  1. First, you must clearly, loudly and often shout to the world that you claim the name as yours as associated with your product or service. Companies that have failed to do this have suffered well-known consequences. Think refrigerator, aspirin and escalator. Each of these started out as a brand name, but the owners did not aggressively protect their use. They are now common nouns.
  2. Secondly, you must carefully and aggressively police the use of the trademark and the quality of the goods and services with which it is associated. If you don’t consistently enforce proper use and quality standards, you will be seen to have abandoned the mark and you will lose the exclusive right to use it. One final thought: a trademark is an adjective describing your product. It is not a noun. In its proper use, it is always paired with the product or service to which it relates. For example, one creates on an Apple computer; one eats an apple.

Safeguard your company’s valuable intellectual property assets. At the earliest opportunity, obtain competent legal advice to protect your corporate IP assets. It won’t break the bank but it will safeguard your company’s future earning power.

By Terry Church

(925)389-8820

TChurch@BCGLegal.com

 

 

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Why You Must Safeguard Your Company’s Intellectual Property | Attorney Advice