IP Layers for Startups Webinar Video

https://youtu.be/tP_Siw4eLZ0

Two PhD researchers spun a university lab project into a company, raised a seed round, and watched their Series A stall eighteen months later over a signature nobody thought to collect. That's just one of the situations we covered in our July 28 webinar, Protect What You're Building: An IP Roadmap from Pre-Seed to Series A, and it captures why we built the session in the first place. Most IP problems founders face are not exotic legal puzzles. They are ordinary oversights that compound.

Startups juggle numerous layers of IP protection, and each one protects a different piece of the business. Patents, trade secrets, trademarks and trade dress, copyrights: most companies need all four, in some proportion. The strategic question is rarely whether to use a given layer. It is where and when to make your investments. Alison walked attendees through the thought process throughout the startup lifecycle.

That question gets harder at the patent-versus-trade-secret boundary, where the wrong instinct costs real money. Founders tend to default to one extreme: patent everything, or keep everything secret and move fast. Neither is a strategy on its own. Mike Wiwchar walked attendees through four questions to ask of every piece of technology: whether it is detectable in the marketplace, whether the business needs a hard legal right to exclude others, whether disclosure undermines the advantage, and whether the cost of prosecution is proportionate to the benefit. Applied piece by piece, this framework produces sharper decisions than a blanket policy ever could.

Finally, Alison addressed problems that many inventors, whether working with startups or large multinationals, face when the time has come to talk about their invention. Inventors must be careful about what they say, when they say it, and to whom and in what context they say it or risk limiting or destroying their IP rights. Conferences, presentations, grant proposals, investor pitches -- inventors must approach every such event with care and preplanning.

For companies working with Baldwin IP, the goal is never to accumulate the most patents. It is to know precisely what you own, confirm you can sell what you built, and remove the surprises before an investor finds them during due diligence.

The webinar works as both a primer for founders just starting this work and a checklist for founders already deep into it.

DISCLAIMER: This webinar is offered for educational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice of any kind, nor does it create an attorney-client relationship with Baldwin IP PLLC. If you have questions about your specific situation, please contact your own IP counsel or reach out to us at info@baldwinip.com.