| Licensing, Technology Transfers, |
From time to time, we are involved with issues of enormous interest to many companies, far beyond the immediate concerns of a current client for whom we may be looking into the matter. We will post them here so that other companies interested in the same general issues may have a place of reference to obtain assistance. At present, the following are before us for study and resolution. Any interested company is invited to contact us about obtaining help for themselves on these often critical questions.
Many companies, especially in the so called old line and heavy industry areas, have either rarely rethought their licensing systems, or they have had the updating done by patent, trademark or copyright specialists. While that enhances from the perspective of the I P specialist, practically no one has been looking at their licensing systems with the more market biased eye of the experienced business counselor and litigator. The result is that many serious problems are simply not addressed in licensing agreements.
We have developed a program of analysis to adjust licensing techniques to specific market performance characteristics, specific groups of potential licensees and licensors, optimize non cash value potential, and reduce the burdens and complexities of dispute resolution. In each area there are several options that may be used interchangeably or in tandem, as the circumstances suggest, on a license by license basis.
If your licensing programs could stand review from this market biased perspective, we would be happy to discuss arrangements to do it for your company.
Every business concept and, indeed, every business entity has a life cycle. In the introductory stage, it is new, innovative, immediately attracts patronage and attention, takes root, prospers, is replicated and grows. Its growth, and the rate of entry of competitors who recognize the new concept and its potentialities for entrepreneurship accelerate. Where the cost of entry into the business is very high, the rate of entry by new competitors may be influenced by pricing strategy. In franchising that is not usually the case. In the growth stage, replication, recognition, profitability spiral upward, as does the rate of entry by new competitors. Eventually the mature stage of the cycle appears. Growth slows. Profits are affected by intense price competition brought on by the approach of apparent saturation, and replication rates decline. Finally, in the decay stage the approach to continued presence in that business is largely to milk it. Expenditures for advertising and marketing diminish, existing units tend to be sold for very low values to bottom feeder buyers.
The most common approach to life lengthening in the mature stage is to recognize the importance of diversification through acquisition, a phenomenon through which the smaller competitors are acquired by the larger ones, and acquisitions are also made in related or diverse fields to compensate for the effects of the end of the growth stage.
We are assisting clients in the development of alternative business replication systems where the life cycle stage is impairing the royalty carrying ability of traditional franchising.
We are assisting clients with regard to the effects of maturity upon enforceability of post termination and post expiration covenants not to compete.
If these are matters of interest or concern to yourselves, you are welcome to contact us to discuss ways in which we might be of assistance to you.
More and more frequently I am encountering so-called 'Confidentiality Agreements' that are re-hashes of some ancient agreement once drafted for some situation having little or nothing to do with any present tense, real protocol for the protection of commercially and competitively sensitive information. Usually the client has been using this for many years on a cut and paste basis, sometimes assigned to an in-house attorney without a strong background in what is now a serious specialty area of legal practice.
This is now sufficiently frequent that I take the initiative and ask a client what kind of protocols they may have to protect such information, if indeed they have any information which they deem competitively very valuable.
The law relating to trade secret and confidential information protection has evolved greatly in recent years, and few companies have had their situations evaluated in light of those changes. Even fewer have any appreciation of just how event specific these protocols could be to protect information which is deemed very valuable.
Our program 'containerizes' the protectable data base after identifying its components and inventorying them, segregates that material in a manner which allows its easy identification without increasing difficulty of access for those who need to use it, and establishes systems of corporate behavior calculated to establish at an evidentiary level, if needed, the presence of protocols that a firm having very valuable confidential materials would be expected to install to secure that protection.
If this is an area of potential risk for you and your company, we invite your inquiries to discuss evaluation, recommended changes and to prepare and help you implement those changes.
Copyright 1997 - 2010 || Richard A. Solomon
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 | Licensing, Technology Transfers, |