Intellectual Property

We have been working with the inventor of a novel paint product as he looks to commercialise his product. Regardless of the product one of the main issues for most start-up ventures is access to funding and balancing expenditure between conflicting priorities.

For ventures based on the exploitation of technology there may be a “chicken and egg” scenario where money is needed to obtain patent or other registered intellectual property protection, while investors are looking for IP protection as a condition of investment. We understand that spending money on lawyers is quite low on the list of priorities for the start-up entrepreneur but at the same time inadequate contracts or processes for capturing creative output in the early stage may come back to bite at fund raise, or on exit from the venture. A failure to keep an invention confidential will prejudice the ability to gain patent protection. We are sensitive to the need to focus early legal input on key areas and have been assisting our client with strategic advice and basic contracts as he continues to gain customer support and commercial opportunities for his product.

We have advised a group of entrepreneurs on the structure and agreements for the exploitation of a proprietary climate-adaptation capacity mapping platform, to support organisations to make climate risk related decisions in relation to their business operations. In addition to the shareholding structure and agreements we prepared IP assignments to collect the founders’ IP and know how into the company, and customer terms and conditions for the hosting and use of the platform.