Besides its people and the quality of their free snacks, an organization’s intellectual property is often its most valuable asset. Whether it’s a patent or a trademark, a graphic design or proprietary market information, or just the unique way they do what they do. Companies must protect their innovations or risk significant damage to their future prospects.

Assessing the vulnerabilities of such valuable inventory is as important as it is time-consuming. But such a review involves answering the same long-set of questions posed to any organization, no matter what type. There is the problem. You have a critical invention. You don’t know if it’s at risk. What do you do? You contact a lawyer, of course. You go through the process, one they have managed many times before. What if you could do this yourself first, before contacting a firm? What if it took just 20 minutes and could be done from the comfort of your desk? An innovative pair of attorneys in Brussels asked that question and came up with a solution. And I had the pleasure of interviewing them.

They are Crowell & Moring partner Jan-Diederik Lindemans and Judith Bussé, both part of the firm’s Technology & Intellectual Property Department in Brussels. And, working with Neotalogic, they developed an interactive app that takes you through a set of attorney-crafted questions that, depending on your answers, take you to other questions. The app applies a layer of artificial intelligence to enhance the information gathering process. Listen to what these innovators had to say about the Crowell & Moring IP Check-Up application, and take it for a test drive yourself. Or, here is a quick video of someone using the app.

This podcast is the audio companion to the Journal on Emerging Issues in Litigation, a collaborative project between HB Litigation Conferences and the legal news folks at Law Street Media, and the Fastcase legal research family, which includes Docket Alarm and Judicata. If you have comments or wish to participate in one our projects, or want to tell me how insightful our guests are, please drop me a note at Editor@LitigationConferences.com.

Tom Hagy
Host of the Emerging Litigation Podcast