Intellectual Property

Your IP is probably worth more than you think. The code your team wrote, the brand you’ve spent years building, the process that makes your product better than everyone else’s. These aren’t just business assets; they’re often the business. And they’re only protected if you’ve taken the right steps to make them yours, legally and unambiguously.

We help founders and business owners identify, protect, and defend their intellectual property from the earliest stage of a company through fundraising, hiring, and growth. Because the window to get this right is almost always earlier than people think.

Most IP problems don’t announce themselves. They surface at the worst possible moment — in a fundraising round, an acquisition, or a dispute — when something that should have been clean turns out not to be. A contractor who built your core product never signed an IP assignment. A co-founder who left still has a claim on something. An advisor agreement that didn’t carve out your pre-existing work. We help you find and fix those gaps while they’re still easy to fix.

Building something new?

Whether it’s a product, a platform, a brand, or a process, the question of who owns it starts the moment you begin. We help you identify what you have, choose the right form of protection (patent, trademark, copyright, or trade secret) and put it in place correctly from the start.

Building with AI?

AI introduces a new layer of IP complexity that most standard agreements don’t account for. Who owns what the model generates? What happens when your product is built on open-source models with conflicting license terms? Is your training data creating copyright exposure you don’t know about? The law here is still catching up but your agreements shouldn’t wait for it. We help founders building with AI structure ownership clearly, draft assignment terms that cover AI-generated outputs, and identify exposure in their stack before it surfaces in diligence.

Bringing on advisors or consultants?

Advisors and consultants often arrive with their own prior work and a poorly drafted agreement can blur the line between what they bring and what they create for you. We draft and negotiate advisor and consulting agreements that assign their contributions to your company cleanly, with clear carve-outs for genuinely pre-existing IP, so ownership is never in question later.

Bringing in investors or co-founders?

New relationships mean new agreements and every agreement has IP implications. We make sure the documents that bring people into your business are clear about what belongs to the company, what belongs to you, and what happens if the relationship ends.

Hiring employees or contractors?

Every person who builds something for your business should be covered by an agreement that puts that work squarely in your company’s name. We draft and review employment and contractor agreements with IP assignment terms that stand up so there’s no ambiguity about ownership when it matters most.

Getting ready to raise or sell?

IP is one of the first things investors and acquirers look at. A messy IP picture — missing assignments, unclear ownership, unregistered marks — can slow a deal or kill it. We make sure your IP is clean and documented ahead of time so diligence is a formality, not a fire drill.

For confidentiality and IP protection within equity arrangements, see Employment & Equity Advisory. 

For data-specific IP considerations, see Data Privacy.

Intellectual Property Matters We Handle

• IP audits and ownership reviews
• Patent strategy and filing coordination
• Trademark registration and brand protection
• Copyright registration and licensing
• Trade secret identification and protection
• IP assignment agreements for founders, employees, and contractors
• Advisor and consultant agreement drafting and negotiation
• AI-specific IP structuring and assignment terms
• Open-source license review and compliance
• IP representations and warranties in fundraising and M&A
• Licensing and IP commercialization agreements
• Pre-incorporation and pre-investment IP cleanup