With intellectual property rights often being one of the most valuable assets of a company, it is essential to ensure that the portfolio of rights is managed in an accurate and cost-effective manner.
Portfolio Management
Using specialist software designed for the management and docketing of intellectual property rights, Hadef & Partners is responsible for managing the local, regional and international trade mark portfolios for clients, large and small, across a diverse range of industry sectors. In this way, the time and resources of the owners of the intellectual property rights can be deployed to other activities and leaving the ‘heavy lifting’ of the portfolio management with a highly experienced team.
We are proud that our clients have entrusted with the responsibility for the management of thousands of intellectual property rights and the portfolio management services offered by Hadef & Partners include:
- Reviewing and consolidating separate intellectual property portfolios and records into one unified database
- Docketing for deadlines and action dates including renewals, expiry of licences, non-use grace period expiration, and deadlines for submitting Declarations of Continued Use where required under local practice (for example, in the United States)
- Managing the recordation of assignment of intellectual property rights, both locally in the UAE and internationally.
- Updating intellectual property portfolios following changes of name, address, corporate status or other changes or updates to the owner details.
- Providing annual ‘year in advance’ reports on renewals, or reports on the portfolio of intellectual property rights held by a client. These can be tailored as needed, whether only for one trade mark in certain countries, a high-level overview list of the various trade marks, designs, or copyrights, or highly detailed reports that provide extensive detail on each intellectual property asset.
- Acting as a ‘single point of contact’ for intellectual property owners and managing and supervising the representative local associates in each territory in which the intellectual property owner has rights.
Intellectual Property Audits
Equally important as the management of an intellectual property portfolio is the ability to accurately and effectively audit what those intellectual property rights are.
Over many years, we have assisted a range of clients with internal reviews and audits of their intellectual property portfolios. In conjunction with the stakeholder, we work together to review how the existing portfolio of intellectual property rights reflects the nature of the client’s operations and use and identify whether the offering of new goods or services, or expansion into new markets, or both, has resulted in ‘gaps’ which need to be protected with new registrations or other mechanisms. Equally, we consider whether the changing nature of the client’s operations has meant that certain intellectual property assets are no longer utilised and whether it is strategically better to simply allow them to lapse or to consider licensing or selling them to third parties to generate a revenue stream.
Where a client is the subject of an investment or acquisition, we work with our client to provide answers to any investor/purchaser queries in relation to the intellectual property assets of our client.
We also have extensive experience in assisting clients audit (and subsequently manage) the intellectual property portfolios that they have acquired, usually through the purchase of a third party business. In particular, we have worked closely with the Corporate team at Hadef & Partners on ‘buy-side’ and ‘investor-side’ transactions across a range of industries and the audit of the intellectual property portfolio of the target entity that is being acquired or in which an investment is being made. This includes reviewing the intellectual property assets but also considering:
- How the ownership of those rights is structured (for example, held by related entities
- Whether any third party intellectual property rights are used under license by the target entity, or where any licences have been granted by the target entity to others
- Any intellectual property disputes, whether from third parties against the target entity, or where brought by the target entity against others.