This article was originally published in the October 31, 2025, issue of the Portland Business Journal.
Many businesses owners understand that intellectual property (IP) can be an important asset for the company. After all, trademarks, patents, and confidential information can help you obtain and maintain market share by protecting your hard work from those that might take advantage of it. But those benefits can be curtailed, or even lost altogether, unless employees understand how to secure those IP rights.
Here are a few things to understand to help get the most value out of your company’s intellectual property:
1. Avoid trademark infringement by monitoring the market
When developing a new brand, it is important not to run afoul of brands that are being used by others. Such an incursion, even when inadvertent, may lead to costs to rebrand and delays to relaunch the product, attorney fees to manage the dispute on your behalf, and, in some cases, a settlement payment or damages award that is paid to the party claiming infringement.
The standard for trademark infringement typically involves the question of whether there is a likelihood of confusion between two trademarks. This analysis typically weighs factors that describe how similar the two marks are, both in terms of the visual element of the marks themselves (meaning the words or logos) and the goods or services associated with the marks (for example, composite panels or custom manufacturing of aircraft). To further muddy the waters, trademark rights do not need to be registered to be enforceable. So, it can be difficult to even determine what potential rights holders are out there.
Since the analysis depends on weighing a number of factors that will be unique to each circumstance, your employees can help you avoid a trademark infringement dispute by involving experienced trademark counsel in your brand development activities from an early stage. Such counsel can, for example, prepare a trademark availability analysis and help you gauge the risk of proceeding with a proposed brand.
2. Timely identify inventions
A patent needs to be formally issued by a governmental authority for the patent rights to be enforceable. And the window for filing a patent application is brief. Typically, if the company wishes to seek patent protection outside of the United States, a patent application must have been on file before any public disclosure of the invention. Within the US, the application must have been filed within a year of a public disclosure or offer for sale by the inventor.
As a result, it is important to have your employees help to identify inventions that are potentially valuable so that they can be timely documented. This can be done by educating your employees about what might be patentable and providing an invention disclosure form for your employees to fill out. The invention disclosure form would preferably be reviewed by a patent attorney that can follow up with the inventors.
3. Avoid patent infringement by understanding the patents in your technological area
Developing a new product, while exciting, also comes with risks. One of those risks is that the new product will infringe patent rights held by someone else. Even if the infringement is entirely innocent—your product was developed without awareness of the patent—the company might still be liable for patent infringement.
As a result, it is important to educate your product developers to understand the patents and published patent applications that are in your field. This could be done by some careful online searching, reviewing product information of others in your field, or engaging patent counsel to perform a landscape analysis, which identifies and analyzes publicly available documents that are in your field. The results of the landscape analysis can help your product designers avoid areas of the technology that are covered by patents. Where appropriate, patent counsel can also advise on designing around patented technology or in providing a freedom-to-operate analysis.
4. Limit disclosure of confidential information
Beyond patents and trademarks, an important asset may be in what a company keeps secret from its competitors. In other words, the secret information has value precisely because it’s secret. This includes inventions that have not yet been made public. To help keep this information confidential, you can educate your employees on what a trade secret is and why it is important to the well-being of the company. You can also establish protocols for limiting access to sensitive information and reducing risky behaviors, such as accessing confidential materials off-site. An IP attorney can help you set up or audit a trade secret program.
This article is provided for informational purposes only—it does not constitute legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship between the firm and the reader. Readers should consult legal counsel before taking action relating to the subject matter of this article.
