Protect Best Ideas Patents, Trademarks, Copyrights
Juhasz Law
Tagline

Defense Against Third-Party Assertions or Claims

Defense against third-party assertions, including invalidation of patents, that stand in the way of your business.

We assess noninfringement and validity, and provide opinions, design-around assistance, patent reexaminations, post-grant and inter partes reviews, trademark oppositions and cancellations.

When you launch a new product into the marketplace, you want to focus on your product, your marketing and sales campaign, customer support, and so on. The last thing you want is to be distracted with charges that your product has infringed on the IP of another person or company.

Juhasz Law helps clients anticipate third party IP problems, before they arise, and deal with third party assertions when they do.

The best practice to minimize charges of infringement is to implement a policy that properly scrubs your product to ensure that it is as clean as it can be from any third party challenge. Towards this end, before product introduction, we help clients ensure the organization steers clear of and has all applicable third party IP rights and that parties they collaborated with have applicable third party IP rights.

Key Strategies for Defending Against Third Party Assertions

Juhasz Law services cover the patent landscaping, freedom to operate, patent clearance, patent noninfringement and patent invalidity assessments. We also counsel clients on the effective use of reverse engineering to steer clear of third party IP.

Comply with all terms and conditions for use of third party IP. This includes dealing with open source issues, avoiding forks into open source, minimizing fork-ins, and complying with open source license obligations on fork-ins.

Check whether new employees are subject to any confidentiality agreement or noncompete agreement under a past employer; ensure that agreements place ownership of IP with the client (e.g, employment agreements, etc.); and ensure employees with confidential restrictions do not work on projects that would be in violation of these restrictions. We also help client’s consider using public domain material.

Ensure ownership of IP and help them address IP issues in employment contracts.

Design, develop and implement programs that document all stages of R&D in lab or design notebooks and avoid or control outside submission programs so that they don’t taint their work.

An important part of minimizing product IP exposure is to know the whole IP landscape. At Juhasz Law, we conduct freedom to operate searches to help you understand what IP rights exist and in what technology space and counsel on technology spaces are free from IP that your product may move into. When potentially problematic third-party IP is identified in a space important to your product, we provide a noninfringement opinion and a invalidity opinion and a design around opinion and a licensing opinion.

Ensure chain of title on licenses from third parties, help to ensure confidentiality agreements and other contracts like collaboration agreements protect organization, and help them put confidentiality agreements in place before any confidential disclosures.

Obtain moral right consents from creators of work to permit use of work in any way, identify all creators of any IP, document the creators.
A good IP policy can help minimize exposure to third party infringement once you launch your product.

Juhasz Law helps clients design, develop and implement IP policies and we help with audits to ensure compliance.