Illinois Intellectual Property Lawyers

Why is Intellectual Property important to your business?

Intellectual property is one of the most valuable aspects of a business and can directly and indirectly impact several areas of your enterprise, including ownership structure, operating procedures, and income. The intellectual property of a business includes its trade secrets, proprietary information, procedures, methods, plans, client lists, trademarks, copyrights, customer information, and data. Businesses rely on a variety of methods to maintain the security of their physical property, plant, personnel, and products. Very little, however, is done to protect the business’s intellectual property, risking the loss of revenue, customers, and market share, and the exposure to costly lawsuits. You can protect your business by following the guidelines set forth by state and federal laws, creating internal policies, and entering into contractual protection agreements.

Our Illinois intellectual property attorneys can help your business develop innovative, effective business policies, procedures & practices to help your company protect your intellectual property and trade secrets. The lawyers at the Chicago law firm of Griffith & Jacobson can help you address and monetize your rights in your intellectual property, proprietary information and trade secrets.

Contact Griffith & Jacobson, LLC - Contact Us or call us at (312) 236-8110 for a free case evaluation.

Read more about why Griffith & Jacobson, LLC is the right choice for your intellectual property law needs.   

Contractual agreements to protect intellectual property

A well-written contract will ensure that the parties with access to your intellectual property will not disclose the confidential or proprietary information to anyone else or use the information for their own benefit without your permission. An effective and enforceable agreement must go beyond identifying the information that will be shared and securing the promise of confidentiality. It also should address:

• The varying uses of the information that are prohibited.
• The methods by which the agreement can be enforced. This should cover whether arbitration is available, which is often cheaper and faster, and which courts can be used if litigation becomes necessary.
• The recovery of legal fees. You may be required to cover the cost of litigation if this is not expressly addressed.
• Whether a court order (often a temporary or permanent injunction) can be obtained to prevent your idea from being exploited and whether it can be done without having to obtain a bond, which can be expensive.

Contractual protections can also be used to require service providers to:

• Develop and maintain procedures to reconstruct data that is destroyed, lost, or corrupted and pay for the costs of correcting any destruction of your company data.
• Notify you of any security breach involving release of company data in order to allow your company to comply with its data breach notification obligations under applicable law.
• Indemnify you from claims by the individuals who provided that data if the service provider fails to comply with its contractual obligations relating to the security and privacy of the data.

Monetizing intellectual property

Intellectual property rights can be transferred or licensed to third parties for financial or other considerations, providing businesses an additional--and often very lucrative--source of income. Examples of licensing arrangements include:

• Industry-sponsored academic research and cooperative research agreements with federal agencies.
• Material transfer agreements.
• Biopharmaceutical research and development alliances (pre-clinical and clinical).
• Contract research and manufacturing agreements.
• Strategic coordination of multiple licensing partnerships.
• Co-development, co-marketing, and co-promotion arrangements.

We invite you to contact our Illinois intellectual property lawyers at 312.236.8110 or via email to discuss how we can help you effectively use and monetize your intellectual property, proprietary information and trade secrets.

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