How to protect your business from internal & external threats

More often than not, it doesn’t necessarily come from external threats.

Today talking about the threats, internally and externally to a business for their intellectual property and what are the most common threats for a small business when it comes to intellectual property and you might be surprised.

It might just be you but you’ve got an obligation to the business and the shareholders to make sure this intellectual property is secure as much as you legally can and taking adequate steps to make sure that it is secure and that it stays secure in the business and that can be anything from your pricing structure and all the things that, from an intellectual property perspective, you’ve worked really hard and would consider it a trade secret, essentially, that if someone was to leave the business, have a think about it, if an employee was to leave the business or a business partner was to leave the business with all this intellectual property, they could literally set up next door the very next day with all of that information that you’ve worked so hard to create and then set up in competition with you and start to take business away from you and leverage off all that hard work that you’ve done and money that you’ve spent in developing all this and paying employees to develop this and paying contractors to build some of this stuff and it could be code for the website, it could be ideas about new product generation, it could be trade marks themselves, business names, logos, taglines, slap-line, by-lines, etc.

So, it’s really important to make sure that you start to think about this as a business owner, especially after a few years in business and realizing, hey, we’re actually amassing quite a lot of intellectual property in this business.

We need to make sure it’s secure, that there are adequate procedures and processes in place, that there are policies that are very strict and make sure that everyone is aware of them, having intellectual property provisions, even in your employment contracts, to make sure and spell out exactly what the intellectual property of the business is, including, but not limited to, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and make sure that there are consequences if they breach that confidentiality, if they take that intellectual property, then there are severe consequences for that and we find a lot of businesses don’t spend enough time making sure that in their employment contracts, that these things are very, very specifically covered, and that restraint of trade provisions are very well set out with cascading clauses to give them the best chance of being enforced as well as non-compete and non-solicitation, can’t pinch clients, can’t talk to, can’t entice other employees away from the business.

Without these things in place as a business owner, it’s really, really dangerous and often it’s too late, the horse has really bolted afterwards and, unfortunately, we have to advise many businesses of how to potentially change things after an event has happened and, potentially, the damage is done, potentially, it can be fatal for a business, that’s how bad it can be.

Not to scaremonger too much, but, we just see it happening so often in a business and businesses not realizing how important it is to have these things in place, even with contractors that are doing work for the business.

They’re even more of a threat because they don’t have the obligations that employees have to you, at law, and anything that they create, essentially, they own, unless it’s assigned to you and that’s one of the things that’s forgotten a lot and most people don’t understand it, even if you pay a contractor to do a certain amount of work for you, just because you pay them for it, doesn’t mean that you own the intellectual property that they create, unless it’s in the contract, it’s enshrined in the contract and there’s an assignment of intellectual property.

So, I hope that helps, there’s just a few things that business owners need to really take care of and we advise every day on it so, if you need us to have a look and give you some advice on it, please feel free and reach out.

Contact us today if you require any assistance with legal protection for your business.

(c) Progressive Legal Pty Ltd – All legal rights reserved (2019)

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