When buying or selling a business, one of the most overlooked assets is a company’s intellectual property. Items like trademarks, copyrights, patents, logos, domain names, websites, licensing agreements, and even trade secrets can be invaluable to a company being bought or sold, according to Crystal Broughan, the intellectual property attorney for MarksGray. Having dealt with issues such as rights to advertising jingles or correct payments for stock photos, I know how easy it is to be tripped up in legal issues. Crystal explained how she has had to review IP assets prior to a sale to ensure patents, copyrights and trademarks have been assigned and filed with the appropriate government agencies.Her work involves verifying ownership, validity and if the registrations are current or expired. At times, small business owners register trademarks and patents in their own name instead of the company name because they want to maintain individual ownership of the asset. She says all of these IP issues need to be put on the table during the sale negotiation process. For future logo and copyright work, I want Crystal on my IP team. View her blog at MarksGray.com. Crystal is featured in this “lunch with Les” photo.
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