Intellectual property rights audit
We will check who actually owns the code, the art, the texts and the name your product is built on — and give you the documents that close the gaps we find.
When you need an intellectual property audit
An investor asked for a warranty
A term sheet asks you to warrant that the company owns everything it uses. Signing that without checking turns a paperwork gap into a personal liability.
A contractor wrote your core code
A payment for work does not by itself move the rights to the payer. Where the contract is silent, the author may still hold what you sell.
You are selling the company
A buyer checks the chain of title before the deal closes. An unassigned asset becomes a price adjustment or an escrow that you fund.
The brand grew past its registration
The name now covers products and markets that were never in the application. Registration works from what was filed: the goods, the classes and the markets named there.
A model generated part of the product
Material made with a generative tool raises two questions: what the tool’s terms allow you to do, and what you can stop others from doing.
What you get
- A map of what you own
- The gaps, sorted by risk
- Documents for the gaps found
- An owner named for every asset
- A report an investor can read
What an intellectual property audit covers
An audit answers one question in writing: for every asset the product runs on, who owns it and on what document. Everything else on this page serves that sentence.
Your rights live in two different places, and that is what decides where we look. Contracts hold everything that arose by being made — the code, the art, the texts — because that kind of right starts with the person who made it, unless the governing law says otherwise, and it moves only when a document moves it.
Registers hold what somebody filed: names, logos, patents. Those you can look up; the first kind do not turn up in a search the same way, and that asymmetry is why this work exists.
That is why an intellectual property lawyer starts from the contracts and only then opens the registers, and why a gap can sit unnoticed until someone else’s diligence opens it.
What we ask you for
- Contracts with employees, contractors, studios and agencies, including those never signed and living only in a chat.
- A list of everything the product is built from: repositories, art, sound, texts, fonts, libraries and licensed material.
- Registration certificates and applications for names, logos and any patents, with the classes and the countries they cover.
- Terms of the tools your team used, where material was generated or bought, and the invoices showing what was paid for.
What counts as an asset
- The product itself: source code, builds, art, animation, sound, music, texts and the data it was trained or seeded on.
- The logo, the packaging and the store listing that carry the name into the market.
- Technical solutions that could be patented, and the ones deliberately kept unpublished as a trade secret.
- Documents that look like admin and behave like assets: design files, style guides, scripts, level layouts and tooling.
- The name itself and the domains and accounts it speaks from, and who the holder of each one is.
Where rights leak
- Work done before the company existed — by founders, in a previous job, or under a different legal entity.
- Contractor agreements that pay for the work and say nothing about who ends up holding it.
- Assets sitting with a person instead of the company: a domain, an account, a design file, a repository under a personal login.
- Third-party material used under terms nobody read: stock libraries, open-source components with conditions attached.
- Group companies that transferred nothing on paper while the work moved between them.
What the report says
- An inventory of assets, each with a named owner and the document behind that owner.
- The gaps, each with what it blocks: a round, a sale, a store listing, a claim against a copy.
- The document that closes each gap — an assignment, a licence, a corrected employment term, a fresh filing.
- What has to be done in order, because some gaps close only while the author is still willing to sign.
- What can be left open, and what it blocks if you leave it — not every gap is worth the cost of closing it now.
We will draft the documents that close the gaps, and file what has to be filed. Where the components are open source and the licence conditions are the whole question, that is an open-source audit; where filings are needed in several countries at once, that is a programme of its own, registration; where the contracts have to be rebuilt for a whole team, creator agreements.
Sources: under the Berne Convention protection arises without any formality; the convention has 182 parties. Computer programs are protected as literary works under article 4 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty.
Stages of work
Scoping the audit — 2–3 working days.
We will agree what the audit answers for: a round, a sale, a store complaint or a clean-up done before anyone asks.
The purpose decides the depth. An audit before a sale reads every contract; one before a store listing reads the assets that ship.
Collecting contracts and access.
You will get one list of what we need and one person to hand it to. Missing documents we will note as missing — that is a finding.
Access matters as much as paper: a repository, a design account and a domain registrar each say who has been treated as the owner.
Reading the chain of title.
For every asset we will follow the line from the person who made it to the company that sells it, and mark where it breaks.
Chats and invoices count as evidence here. By themselves they do not transfer the rights, but they do show what the parties believed they had agreed.
Checking what is on the registers.
We will check names, logos and patents against the registers of the countries you sell in: what is registered, to whom, for which goods and until when.
Third-party and generated material.
We will read the licence conditions of the components, the stock material and the tools that produced part of the product, and say what each allows you to sell.
Some conditions travel with the material into your product and stay there. Those are worth knowing before a buyer finds them for you.
The report and the gap list — about a week.
One document: the inventory, the gaps sorted by what they block, and the paper that closes each. It is written to be handed to an investor as it is.
Closing the gaps.
We will draft the assignments, the licences and the employment terms, and file what has to be filed. You decide which gaps are worth closing now.
Our other work on rights and content sits in the IP & Content area.
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