Intellectual property: Safeguarding your company’s innovation

This summer, the In-House With You team at HCR Law is ‘walking on legal sunshine’ with Hot Tips for Cool Counsel, a seven-part article series created especially for in-house lawyers. Whether you’re planning ahead or tackling new challenges, these summer legal essentials offer a seasonal refresh with practical tips and insights, to help you stay sharp, compliant, and confident.

In the first in our series, Alice Wright, Trade Mark Attorney, looks at the importance of protecting trademarks, patents, and copyrights within the company, and offers key tips on how to manage IP assets.

Innovation is the lifeblood of any competitive business. Whether it’s a breakthrough in product design, a novel software algorithm, or a unique business process, protecting these innovations is critical to sustaining market advantage. In-house legal counsel sits at the strategic crossroads where law, business, and innovation intersect. The role is not just to reactively manage risk but proactively build frameworks that safeguard intellectual property (IP), foster a culture of compliance, and align legal protections with business objectives.

Here are three top tips that every in-house counsel should prioritise to ensure their company’s innovations are properly protected.

1. Establish and systemise a robust IP identification and protection process
2. Foster and build a culture of confidentiality and clear ownership
3. Align your IP strategy with broader business and competitive goals.

Establish a robust IP identification and protection process

Why it matters:

Many companies lose valuable intellectual property simply because they fail to recognise it. Innovation often emerges from day-to-day operations, and without a process to capture, evaluate, and protect it, valuable assets can slip through the cracks.

How to do it:

Create clear channels for IP disclosure – Establish an internal IP disclosure system that makes it easy for employees to report potential inventions or innovations. This could be a digital form, an intranet portal, or a regular review process with R&D teams. Ensure that employees know when and how to disclose potential IP.

Integrate IP reviews into project lifecycles – Work with product development and engineering teams to embed IP reviews into key milestones—concept approval, prototype, pre-launch, etc. Legal shouldn’t be an afterthought. Your presence early in the process increases the chances of identifying protectable innovations.

Choose the right form of protection – Not every innovation warrants a patent. Sometimes a trade secret or copyright may be more appropriate. For example:

• Patent: A new device or method that’s novel and non-obvious
• Trade secret: Proprietary formulas, algorithms, or processes not easily reverse-engineered
• Copyright: Software code, written documentation, marketing materials.

As in-house counsel, develop a matrix to help business units decide what kind of protection is best suited to their innovation.

Pro Tip: Periodically audit existing patents and trade secrets. Innovations evolve, and your IP portfolio should too. Obsolete patents should be pruned to save costs, and new ones filed to reflect evolving technology.

Build a culture of confidentiality and ownership

Why it matters:

The strength of your company’s legal protection is only as strong as the behaviour of its employees. One careless moment—like a casual mention of a new invention at a conference or a poorly worded email—can lead to the loss of patent rights or trade secret status.

How to do it:

Educate employees early and often – Don’t assume engineers, marketers, or even senior managers understand IP rules. Regular, tailored training sessions can demystify IP law and reinforce the importance of confidentiality. Topics to cover include:

• When public disclosure kills patentability
• The dos and don’ts of discussing innovations externally
• Ownership rights of IP developed on company time.

Make IP protection part of onboarding and annual training.

Strengthen employment and contractor agreements – Ensure that all employment, consultant, and vendor contracts include robust IP ownership and confidentiality clauses. These should:

• Clearly assign any IP developed to the company
• Obligate the employee/contractor to maintain secrecy during and after the term
• Require prompt disclosure of innovations.

Also consider NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) for external collaborations. Make them standard practice, not an afterthought.

Leverage exit interviews – When employees leave, especially engineers or senior developers, conduct an exit interview focused on IP. Reiterate their ongoing duty of confidentiality, confirm what access they had, and collect any devices or notes. This minimises the risk of IP leakage to competitors or startups.

Pro Tip: Foster an “IP ownership mindset”. Recognise employees who identify valuable innovations. Celebrate IP achievements internally to make protection part of the culture, not just a legal box-checking exercise.

Stay aligned with business strategy and competitive landscape

Why it matters:

IP is not just a legal asset—it’s a business tool. For your protection efforts to be truly effective, they need to align with the company’s broader commercial objectives and competitive strategy. Without this alignment, you risk overprotecting irrelevant technology or under protecting strategic innovations.

How to do it:

Conduct strategic IP landscaping – Use competitive intelligence and patent analytics to understand what your competitors are protecting. This helps to:

• Identify potential infringement risks
• Reveal gaps in the market your innovation could fill
• Guide your own IP strategy – defensive or offensive.

For example, if a competitor is aggressively patenting in a new tech area, your team might need to evaluate similar innovations internally to avoid freedom-to-operate issues or consider filing counter-patents.

Involve legal in strategic planning – Request a seat at the table during product road mapping and strategic planning sessions. When legal is involved from the beginning, you can:

• Identify innovations early
• Advise on go-to-market risks
• Align protection efforts with key business priorities (e.g. protecting core algorithms or customer-facing features that drive differentiation).

Manage IP as a portfolio – Treat IP assets like financial assets. Create a dashboard that shows the company’s IP by type (patents, trademarks, trade secrets), status (pending, granted, lapsed), geography, and value to the business. Use this to:

• Prioritise maintenance fees and renewals
• Support licensing or M&A activity
• Justify legal budget allocation.

Pro Tip: Consider offensive strategies too, like monetising dormant patents, joining defensive patent pools, or filing strategic patents to block competitor moves. IP should support your business goals, not just defend them.

Final thoughts

In-house counsel are uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between innovation and protection. It’s not enough to rely on external IP counsel after the fact, the most valuable protection comes from being embedded in the business, understanding the company’s strategic direction, and championing a culture where innovation is both encouraged and protected. By establishing clear processes, educating the workforce, and aligning with business goals, you can ensure your company’s innovations are not only recognised but turned into enduring competitive assets.

In an economy where innovation drives value, in-house counsel must evolve from legal risk managers to strategic IP partners. With the right approach, legal teams can help build not just a portfolio of patents, but a fortress of innovation.

To read more in the ‘Hot Tips for Cool Counsel’ series click here.