LAW ADVISORY SERVICES

• Patent
• Trademark
• Copyright
• Business Law
• Litigation

We live in a complex and rapidly changing regulatory and business environment where companies are exposed to strict compliance requirements, ever-changing intellectual property laws, and diverse business challenges. At Royal Craig, we combine our understanding of legislative regulations and deep industry knowledge to help our clients stay competitive yet compliant. Thus, as part of our integrated business services, Royal Craig, offers its clients a diverse array of Advisory services. We cover the full range of business law advice with the following main areas of expertise:

• Corporate & Commercial Law
• Mergers & Acquisitions
• Intellectual Property Law
• Contract Law
• Consulting
• Strategy Development

In-house intellectual property policy is a core strength. We have helped to implement in-house IP policies in several larger corporations and have watched these policies mature and adapt to changing times. Our goals are to ensure: 1) business strategy and IP strategy are aligned; 2) employees and key management are sensitized to significant IP issues, 3) early-identification of potential employee-innovations, their strategic value, and an appropriate protection plan; and 4) heightened competitive IP intelligence and timely patent infringement-avoidance. “Best Practice” efforts to achieve these goals include:

1. Formation of In-house Intellectual Property Management Committee & Operations Manual Goals: Oversee in-house technology management, maintain Employee Policy Manual (ownership and privacy policies, etc.); delegate continuing due diligence responsibilities, (forms management, interface with legal, patenting/registration filter, etc.). Note: here we like diversity of composition and quarterly or semi-annual meetings.
2. Charter/operations manual with an IP Primer
3. All-Employee Policy Manual with Patent/Trademark/Copyright Primer
4. Contract Forms Library: a repository of pre-approved legal forms for use by the committee (employee invention submission form, trademark/copyright submission form, sponsored research agreement, technology license, patent license, evaluation license, software license, confidentiality agreement, independent contractor/consultant agreement, joint development agreements, patent assignment, etc.
5. Monitoring. We highly recommend monitoring key competitors and technologies to identify troublesome patents before or shortly after they issue. An early warning system to evaluate and avoid infringement threats and facilitate Patent Office validity challenges is invaluable. We use a free USPTO service and construct alerts based on patent keyword monitoring. We are perfectly willing to teach you how to do it (gratis) or set it up ourselves. Expect weekly notice of published applications by RSS feed and/or e-mail. We will screen and filter only significant threats and provide timely notice to the committee and/or yourself.
6. Continuing Patent / Trademark / Copyright Work. As new employee invention disclosures are received we recommend a thorough patentability/clearance search to find the closest prior art for each concept. This effort will diffuse any infringement issues, add focus to the patent applications, and ultimately save cost during prosecution at the patent office. If the search is positive, we generally recommend filing a U.S. provisional patent application next, followed within a year by either a U.S. utility patent application or PCT (International) patent application.

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