Once inventoried or described in writing, your company’s trade secrets and innovative concepts can be much more easily tracked, protected, and developed, thereby preventing the loss, neglect, or mismanagement of your company’s crown jewels – its valuable intellectual properties.
You probably recognize that trade secrets are pervasive, not just in your company, but in all profit-seeking businesses. Surprisingly, just as pervasive among most companies is their lack of knowledge of the status of their trade secrets. Of course, you can’t reasonably manage something until you know it exists, yet most companies have no definitive record of their trade secrets, and thus manage them rather poorly, often failing to take reasonable measures to maintain their secrecy. Fortunately, the solution to this problem – taking a good inventory – is simple to understand, and relatively easy to implement.
Trade secrets can hold a tremendous amount of value, and even can account for most of the value of your company’s intellectual assets. But chances are that your company has other very valuable intellectual assets, some of which might be protected by other types of intellectual property rights. And just as it can be worthwhile to inventory your company’s trade secrets, it also can be very beneficial to tally your company’s other intellectual assets, including its intellectual property.
Upon completing a professional IP audit, your company will gain a thorough understanding of the status of its IP (and potentially, all of its intellectual assets). In particular, a professional IP audit will systematically review how well your company has been respecting its own IP and other’s IP, by:
- Reviewing your company’s IP-related practices, records and documents;
- Inventorying IP controlled and/or used by your company;
- Prioritizing your company’s mission-critical IP;
- Analyzing the scope, ownership, and vulnerabilities of that mission-critical IP;
- Verifying that appropriate strategies, policies, and procedures are in place to optimize returns;
- Recommending changes needed to optimize returns from your company’s mission-critical IP; and
- Identifying how you can mitigate liability for possible third party claims of IP infringement against your company.
Interested in conducting an IP audit? Feel free to get in touch. I’d be happy to help.