The Traklight Blog

Intellectual property (IP) is having its moment in the sun, but often not for the best of reasons. For every story heralding the importance of IP in business, there are multitudes more indirectly doing the same thing when discussing the latest lawsuits over copyright or patent infringement or co-founder feuds over who holds the right to their creations. Too many startups make early-stage mistakes regarding their IP that can at best hinder and at worst sink their burgeoning businesses, often due to nothing more than oversight or ignorance on the subject. Here are some of the top mistakes made by startups.

Do you know how to prevent your ideas from being stolen? If you have an idea lying around that is easily accessible, you risk losing it. It’s vital that your company take action and create an intellectual property (IP) strategy in order to be successful. Getting the necessary protection for your ideas is the most important step you can take to help ensure its future. But what types of protection can you get for these ideas?

For music listeners, Spotify has become almost ubiquitous. The service offers users access to a vast catalog of songs on demand and at their fingertips. And fans of music and podcasts are overwhelmingly taking advantage of the easy-to-use service — a recent story puts their subscriber base at 7o million users. But if the streaming era of media has taught us anything, it is that digital rights can prove problematic in the relationship between artist and platform, and music has proven no exception.

Small businesses face a number of challenges as they try to grow. Being a small company means have to approach things differently than larger companies in your field. And while a lack of assets can be a hindrance, it can also offer flexibility. Bigger businesses may have the money and workforce, but they can also fall victim to an entrenched mindset that can prevent new and innovative thinking. Here are some ways that small businesses can succeed at winning an unfair game.

The new year is an opportunity for a fresh start, both personally and professionally. The turning over of the calendar is as good an opportunity as any to try and ditch poor habits and implement positive ones. For many of us, that means trying to get organized. With as much as life throws at us, it's easy to let things fall as they may as we try to stay sane over the course of a calendar year. But with some good habits maintained over time, it's possible for both you and your business to get and stay organized.

The holiday season offers a chance for reflection and thought, not only on months and years past, but our current positions and where we see ourselves in the near future. For business owners, the process of assessing the past, present and future is necessary for planning your next steps. But mistakes made in the past can have serious implications for the future.

Each year, companies lose billions of dollars to intellectual property (IP) theft. Particularly, small businesses that are still in their early stage seem to be the most vulnerable. This is because small business owners are widely known for their reluctance to allocate part of their annual budget to the protection of their ideas. But protecting your IP doesn't have to be a budget-busting proposition. There are simple, reasonable steps that can be taken to keep your work safe, as well as your budget

This article was originally featured on Above the Law.

We were excited to be a part of the New Lawyers and Technology event in Irvine, sponsored by Case.one and hosted by Whittier Law School. Our panel was moderated by Allen Rodriguez of ONE400 and featured Bahar Ansari of Case.one, Jason Velez of 1LAW, and Josh Blandi of Unicourt, all of whom had interesting insights to offer on how new lawyers can bring a fresh perspective on technology to the law, and how technology can help to improve how lawyers serve their clients.

This article was originally featured on Law Practice Today.

This article was originally featured on ABA Journal.

We held our second Denver event on the evening of October 26th, hosted by Lawgical. The evening's focus was a discussion on increasing access to justice through the use of technology in law. The evening kicked off with a Darwin Talk entitled "Time is the New Green" given by Adam Camras of Lawgical and Legal Talk Network.  Every small inefficiency in your life can add up to time wasted, both professionally and personally. That goes for law, where you can still find people running their firms using what are by modern standards crude tools. The firms that are succeeding are the ones who are using the latest in technological innovations and software to be efficient and save those precious minutes and hours that add up over the course of time.

If there is one fact that is most frequently repeated at Evolve Law events when discussing the current state of law, it is that most lawyers are resistant to change. This resistance helps to explain much of the current predicament that the legal industry is in. Businesses are adapting to new economic realities and reshaped marketplaces, but too many law firms continue to operate under the model they’ve had for decades — a model that fails to meet the needs of the modern client or customer. Where law firms have fallen short, legal tech has stepped in to try and fill the void in access to justice and legal help, as well as push the legal industry into the twenty-first century.

This article was originally featured on the ABA Journal.

For the second time, we were fortunate enough to organize a Darwin Talks event at the Minnesota State Bar Tech Conference, with a group of speakers who were able to offer a variety of perspectives on different areas of the law and how to improve them.

Businesses are able to learn and grow through a shared knowledge. None of us walk into a job and know how everything operates, either at that company or in the industry. We're relying on the knowledge of others who have gone before us to educate ourselves, as well as the know-how of our current co-workers. And new people can add to this knowledge in their own way, often bringing new ideas or fresh perspectives to old problems or methods. There's a saying that goes, "If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together," and something similar could be said for gaining knowledge.

Our most recent New York event covered the new topic of "Data & Analytics in the Law" as we look to focus more on adoption and implementation of legal tech in panels and discussions. The evening kicked off with a Darwin Talk on Artificial Intelligence: An Historical Perspective from Dean Sonderegger of Wolters Kluwer.

Evolve Law was back in Silicon Valley for another great legal tech event, this one focused on the "Tech Savvy In-House Counsel." The evening kicked off with a Darwin Talk from Tina Fan of SimpleLegal. Tina's presentation was on "Best Practices for Implementing Legal Operations Software". When it comes to implementation, there isn't a one-size-fits-all answer for every company; there are many tools available for firms and companies to use. When looking at implementing legal ops software, in-house legal departments need to examine what their goals are as a department and ask whether they align with what the company goals are, as well as asking why they're looking to implement software and what they are hoping to accomplish with it. They also need to plan for how they want to implement the software and the resources necessary to get it implemented correctly and to get everyone in the department or company on board. Perhaps most importantly, when you're looking to automate a process, you want to make sure that it's a good process that you're committing to.

In our final installment of a five-part series, we close by interviewing Mark Oblad, around contract on automaton plus a look to the future. Blockchain and cryptocurrency law are opportunities for attorneys, not threats. Lawyers must embrace technology, although not all need to become as expert as Mark or other programmers in order to leverage technology.

Much has been written on blockchain recently, even in legal. We continue our series with Mark Oblad, VP, Legal and Finance at JW Player, who has coded a number of tools for automating transactions. Last time we talked about open source and industry source of information for contracts here.  This time, we look first at smart contracts. The concept of the “smart contract” has taken hold and is becoming increasingly the focus of legal technology groups, such as the Computable Contracts Initiative at Stanford Law School’s CodeX, Cardozo Law School’s Tech Startup Clinic, New York Law School’s Center for Business and Financial Law, law.MIT.edu, and Computational Legal Studies.