Intellectual Property Rights and Change Management
In any business there will be rules that management and staff need to follow. Some will be more important than others. For example, to safeguard a company’s intellectual property rights, there are a couple of useful procedures that business might introduce. IP issues arise day to day so it’s important to manage them.
If a business outsources work or collaborates on projects with others it would do well to put systems in place so as to ensure valuable IP is not lost. IP generally needs to be considered very early on.
Consider the inventor of the Karaoke machine. He earned nothing from the billion dollar industry he spawned because he didn’t realise he could take steps to protect his invention so as to reap the benefits if it succeeded. Specifically he could have patented his invention. However, it’s not just patents that can have a far reaching impact. There are other crucial IP rights like copyright which can be lost if you fail to take the right steps early on in a project.
In practice a simple rule requiring particular documents to be used before a company agrees certain terms with a third party makes the difference between protecting your brand or other IP and losing potentially valuable assets. But is that the end of it or is it likely that sometimes your best laid plans will be ignored for one reason or another?
On 13 August Shireen Smith, founder of Azrights Solicitors, an intellectual property law firm, and author of the best selling book, Legally Branded, will be running a webinar to discuss this as part of a new series of webinars looking at law in its ‘real life’ business context. Shireen will be joined by Suzanne Hazelton, author of two books, Raise Your Game, and Great Days at Work. Suzanne is an expert in getting the best from people and processes. She describes herself as a peopleologist as she works with the people in a business from a behavioural perspective. She previously worked on projects such as software beta programmes within IBM, and so has a good understanding of why it is so important to have legal controls in place. At the same time her background gives her a unique insight into the frustrations legal controls can give rise to for people within an organization, and so is ideally placed to advise companies, on how to successfully manage change. During the webinar Suzanne will focus on what a company would want to do in practice, to ensure procedures are observed by staff, particularly in a fast moving, possibly multi-national environment.
The webinar will be relevant to companies, whether based in the UK or elsewhere, as the legal controls being discussed are likely to be universally applicable in most common law jurisdictions, such as the USA, and Australia to name a few. The emphasis will be less on the law, and more on the need for procedures to protect IP. So, the webinar will be relevant regardless of jurisdiction, for any business owner, or corporate in-house lawyer looking for insights into why procedures may be necessary to preserve IP, and what pitfalls they might encounter. It will give you strategies to overcome the challenges ahead.
