We can help your small business with many intellectual property related issues, except for litigation, which we refer out. This involves answering your questions involving patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, and related contracts. Primarily, our goal in providing intellectual property related services is to:
- assist your small innovative business with risk, liability, and uncertainty reduction when faced with intellectual property dilemmas,
- fill in the intellectual property knowledge gap in your small business so you can outsmart your competitors, and
- position your small business to benefit from intellectual property.
To further these goals, we provide five general categories of services –
Research and clearance: These services involve competitive research, determining the availability of intellectual property to your company, avoiding legal issues with third parties, and charting a course for securing exclusivity for your innovations and brands. These services often require a legal opinion that spells out the risks and reduces the uncertainty in moving forward with your innovation or brand. Some examples of the types of products you will find here:
- Patentability searches and related opinions
- Freedom to operates searches and related opinions
- Patent infringement opinions
- Design around opinions
- Trademark knockout searches and related opinions
- Trademark clearance searches and related opinions
Registration: Here, we take steps to secure the exclusivity you are entitled to by using the intellectual property system. On your behalf, we strive to obtain patent grants, trademark certificates, and copyright registrations, all tools that document the ownership and strength of your intellectual property as well as form a basis for enforcing your rights. Exemplary products include:
- Patent application preparation and filing, prosecution, and maintenance
- Trademark application preparation and filing, prosecution, and maintenance
- Copyright application preparation and filing
Intellectual Property Portfolio Management: We take a broader look at your business and provide management tools for handling your IP as an asset of your company. This involves determining deadlines, cost estimates and budgeting, valuation, aligning your IP with your business goals, trade secret programs, best practices, IP policies and procedures, and taking an overall birds-eye approach with your IP.
Transactional: IP is similar to other types of property. It can be owned, transferred (assigned), or rented out (licensed). These services endeavor to secure ownership of the IP and allow you to leverage its value by entering into contracts with others. Typical contracts involved:
- Licensing agreements
- Work for hire agreement
- Confidential disclosure agreements
- Assignments
- Employment agreements
- Design agreements
General IP Counseling: Sometimes you have a question that does not fit neatly into one of the other categories or just need some general counseling and strategy about how to approach and benefit from IP. We also provide an enormous amount of IP related education to keep you ahead of your competition.
Our services range significantly in price and are highly dependent on the facts surrounding your situation. However, we endeavor to tailor a strategy that best fits your circumstances (after all, we are not a form service) and provide estimates of costs up front and flexible payment plans. Please consider that we are quite experienced with dealing with individuals with great ideas, start-ups in search of funding, and businesses with limited budgets.