IP Counseling

Home / Services / IP Counseling
All services
General IP

IP counseling across patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets that helps you spot what is worth protecting, protect it well, and turn your intellectual property into something the business can actually use.

Intellectual property is easiest to protect before you need it and hardest to fix after. Our IP counseling practice gives you ongoing, practical guidance to identify the patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets worth holding, secure them properly, and put them to work, so your IP supports the business instead of becoming an afterthought during a deal or a dispute.

IP Strategy and Planning

We help you decide what to protect and where to spend. That means aligning your IP plan with where the business is going, setting protection priorities across patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets, and allocating budget to the assets that matter most. Because our attorneys come from software engineering, technical roadmaps and product decisions are familiar ground, not something we need translated for us.

Support During Transactions

IP shows up in nearly every significant deal, and overlooked rights can sink value fast. We handle the IP side of acquisitions, technology licensing, joint ventures, and financings, confirming what you own, what you can license, and what risks ride along. You get clean answers on ownership and freedom to use, so the IP questions do not stall the broader transaction.

Risk Assessment

We find IP problems while they are still cheap to solve. Through clearance searches, freedom-to-operate studies, and IP audits, we tell you whether a name, product, or feature is likely to draw a challenge before you commit to it. The point is to inform real business decisions with honest risk analysis rather than discover the exposure after launch.

Outside IP Counsel

Plenty of IP questions are too small for a project and too important to ignore. We act as your go-to outside counsel for the day-to-day issues, the licensing question, the cease-and-desist letter, the employee invention concern, with quick, plain-spoken answers. You get a steady relationship with people who already know your portfolio and your priorities.

Frequently asked questions

Start with what drives revenue, what truly differentiates you from competitors, and the brands customers recognize. Those assets give you the most return on protection spend. Factor in your budget and whether you could realistically enforce a given right before you commit to it.

Look across your products, internal processes, brands, and content, and ask two questions: what gives us a competitive edge, and what would a competitor want to copy? An IP audit walks through each of those systematically and usually surfaces assets you didn't realize were protectable, like an internal tool or a process you built in-house.

Early, before you publicly disclose an invention, before a deal closes, and before a product launches. Many IP problems are cheap to prevent and expensive to fix once a deadline has passed or a disclosure is already public. A short conversation up front often saves a much larger cleanup later.

It comes down to a tradeoff: a patent requires you to publicly disclose the invention, while a trade secret requires you to keep it confidential. Patents make sense when you'd be able to detect and prove infringement; trade secrets make sense when the innovation is hard for others to reverse-engineer, like a manufacturing process buried inside your factory. We help you weigh detectability and how you'd actually enforce each one.

Protect where you sell, where you manufacture, and where your competitors operate. International protection adds up quickly, so it pays to be selective rather than filing everywhere. Map your real markets and supply chain first, then prioritize from there.

We work alongside in-house teams as specialized support and extra capacity when their plate is full. We plug into your existing processes and align with your business goals rather than running a separate track. Think of us as a resource your team can pull in for IP-specific questions or workload spikes.

Our team

Attorneys who can help

Document products

Related document products

Order attorney-drafted documents related to this service.

Browse all products

Let's talk about your ip counseling needs.

Get in touch