IP audit

Why audit your intellectual property?

The key benefits include:

• ensuring that the company’s assets, including branding, inventions, designs, methods, data, text and logos, have been protected in all relevant markets and for all relevant goods or services;

• developing a system and strategy for identifying, assessing and protecting such rights in the future;
• identifying any gaps in IP protection;
• reducing the costs of future IP enforcement actions, as stronger rights increase your chances of success;
• preventing competitors from stealing your good ideas, or even stopping you from using your own signs;
• identifying potential cost savings;
• profiting from licensing activity;
• helping to quantifying the value of IP in your business; and
• increasing your attractiveness to investors.

 

An IP audit invariably pays for itself many times over with the benefits that it delivers.

 

Page White Farrer has many decades of experience of reviewing the intellectual property rights of its clients and helping owners develop profitable commercial strategies to monetarise their intellectual property.

 

Working with your company's marketing, management, research and engineering, innovation and design, and legal teams, our IP audit service includes:

• drawing up a plan for your business setting out the extent of the enquiry;
• assessing the current systems that the company adopts to identify new IP;
• identifying all IP in the business;
• reviewing each asset’s composition, status, ownership, potential value, licensing potential, and maintenance costs;
• reviewing joint venture agreements and licensing agreements;
• reviewing IP registers to check existing rights and their scope;
• comparing licences and coexistence agreements entered into by the business with the activities of that business to ensure past agreements are being complied with;
• reviewing work manuals, franchise agreements, publications, knowhow, methods, recipes, distribution contracts, client lists and product certificates; and
• identifying any areas of weakness.

 

Following the audit, we will provide:

• a report on the IP assets that you own, their status and potential; and
• a practical set of recommendations to help you protect, manage, and commercialise your IP most efficiently and cost-effectively.