No. 5: You Call Your IP Attorney Too Late!
My last of the top five is an easy one to comprehend: Call your IP lawyer sooner, rather than later! And “sooner” means before signing a contract, engaging an independent contractor, hiring a technical employee, entering into a joint development arrangement with another company, commercializing a product, launching a website, or undertaking any similar activities that potentially affect your firm’s IP rights. A VERY common example of this mistake is the entrepreneurial firm, in a rush to launch a new product or service, calling their attorney to file a patent application covering the new product or service more than one year after the launch date. Such a firm would quickly find out that they have lost their ability to apply for a patent (in every jurisdiction in the world) due to the passage of the one-year time period! (Think of this rule as a “one-year patent statute of limitations.”) Thus, in most situations, a quick consultation at the “sooner” point in time will not only prevent the loss of potential IP rights, but save a lot of time and money as well. I often use the following analogy to drive this point home to my clients: You want your IP attorney to be a fire marshal that prevents fires, rather than a firefighter that has to put out fires (presumably after some damage has already been done).
Conclusion
The five common IP-related mistakes (described in five different posts on this site) are but a few that I have observed over the years, and some of them can be very costly. Of course, as mentioned above, my list assumes a company is paying attention to IP in the first place. So, given that IP accounts for a vast majority of a small high-tech enterprise’s value and is the key to any such enterprise’s exit strategy, entrepreneurs should remember that ignoring IP altogether is the biggest mistake of them all.
