What kind of protections should I provide for my development team as they are working on new products or processes?
Text Transcript
David Roberts, Intellectual Property Attorney: Any time your company is working on a development team or has a development team in place – creating intellectual property, developing new products – you have a real challenge on your hands. How do you protect that in the event that someone were to leave or something were to happen to someone on the team itself? And so in principle you want to create a top-down culture of protection and valuing the property that’s being created by that development team.
But then there’s a couple of just logistical items that you can keep in mind as well. The first is using company-owned assets for that development team. We see a lot of companies allowing their employees to bring devices to work and work on their own assets. That can create a lot of issues for the company, so we recommend that you think about using company-owned assets.
Secondly, we all hate them, but strong passwords are a good thing that you need to employ throughout your organization.
Thirdly, you’ll want to think about some trade secret training. What trade secret training can do is just enforce what the best practices are for your organization and help those members of the development team understand the proper do’s and don’ts around trade secrets.
And then finally, one of the things that you want to do with your development team is have strong legal agreements in place with them. So whether it’s a consulting agreement or an employment agreement, you really want some clauses in there that talk about assignment of the intellectual property to the company, as well as some non-compete provisions.