In today’s digital world and especially as businesses move toward building large brands, companies are building and accumulating significant intellectual property portfolios, whether it be trademarks in branding assets, copyrights to website pages, patents to artificial intelligence processing applications and modules, or trade secrets to a highly valuable recipe or a client list. As businesses combine, divide, and engage in mergers and acquisition activities, many businesses are finding that their value may be partly grounded in their intellectual property and that evaluating their intellectual property assets makes up a core portion of the diligence behind such a transaction.
A major part of intellectual property due diligence today also includes issues relating to technology (aka information technology due diligence). The goal of any intellectual property due diligence in a potential transaction will include determining what intellectual property (if any) the target holds and its value. It will also include understanding the target company’s policies and practices regarding document retention; its various intellectual property registrations across jurisdictions; past, ongoing or anticipated disputes; intellectual property enforcement; intellectual property protection measures; and the location of any intellectual property owned or licensed by the target company, as well as the local practices and IP compliance environment.
Please click here to read the full article by Sajai Singh, published in American Bar Association.
Sajai's broad-based practice focuses on Mergers, Acquisitions, Joint Ventures, strategic alliances, restructurings and financings (whether debt or equity), with particular emphasis on cross- border transactions.