[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to what Counts, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of information governance. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries. We talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company.
Whether you're interested in information governance, have a need, or just curious to hear about information management challenges like email management, retention management, or asset data management, this podcast is for you.
This is Lee, and in this episode, Moore and I will talk about managing the intellectual property life cycle.
Whether you're a founder, a fractional executive, or a compliance lead, this episode will help you rethink ip not just as protection, but as a strategic asset that demands life cycle stewardship.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Okay, that sounds very important.
And it is.
So. IP is a phrase that you might hear.
You might hear it in the. In a lot of legal settings.
You might hear it in pop culture, talking about one of the things you and I have been dancing around for a while, Lee, no pun intended, because it's about the masters of Taylor Swift's songs and the battle that she went through, the legal battle that she went through to gain control of them.
And closer to home, my cousin had a similar battle. He's also a musician and it took him 10 years to get back the masters from his first album.
So it's a phrase that gets used a lot, but I don't know that it's a phrase that a lot of people really understand, and even us in our business, we spend a lot of time talking to our clients about protecting their intellectual property.
And we do treat it as a strategic asset when we talk to our clients about it.
And yet I think until recently, when we've started thinking in a very concrete way about our own intellectual property, some.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Things.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: Became more clear or more real. To me. That phrase of more real is something I've been using for a long time in our world in consulting. When I was a very new consultant, I used to write these documents and they sounded beautiful, beautiful plans to take care of information and manage all your records.
And at some point, and it was when I was working for the Department of Energy as a client, all of a sudden, in a conversation with their information management lead director in this one office, it became crystal clear to me what I was trying to tell her and what she needed her department to do in order to protect the records of that group in the Department of Energy. It was like an epiphany. A. I remember it very clearly, and it was a long time ago.
And it's the difference, in my view It's a difference between theory and practice.
And we have always, at Trailblazer Consulting, kind of prided ourselves on being not just a strategy consultant where you end up with a book on the shelf, a pretty book, it reads beautifully, but that nobody could follow it.
And I've been thinking about that in terms of IP lately because the principles are pretty clear and even this lifecycle concept, which I want to get into a little bit more, but the principles are you document the fact that you created something unique.
It's your intellectual property because you developed it. It's not something that's published. It's not something that you learn from somebody else. It's something that you developed. And we've developed a lot of IP in our world. If you're going to be a good consultant, that's what you do. You look at new, look at problems, you come up with new solutions, you test them out, and you develop approaches and methods and tools and sort of standard ways of talking about what you're doing and presenting the ideas to your clients and helping them put these practices in place in their organization.
[00:04:30] Speaker A: So, sorry, but. So you're saying of more real than is really practical application?
[00:04:39] Speaker B: It is. Yes, I think so. It's. So it's okay. We always tell our clients you need to document everything. We've talked about that a lot on this, on this podcast, too, why it's important to document things. Our whole world started, yours and mine, with records management, which is all about documentation and providing evidence of something that happened and how it happened.
So when you start digging into that, going from the theory, which is true and sound and has been in place for a long time, to the practical of document everything, that's huge. That suddenly becomes huge, huge.
And then you want to say, we also say also document the updates and keep control of versions and track who commented on what. Did you incorporate the comments?
Did you, did you create a new version number? Is it a major version? Is it a minor version? And over the years, we have written a lot of rules. I wrote a draft policy on drafts, the policy on drafts over and over again, especially working for rulemaking agencies and regulatory agencies of the federal government, because they have regulatory. They have their own regulatory requirements to meet as far as capturing public comments, even internal to the agency comments, but outside of the office that developed the draft rule, they have to capture all the comments that come from inside the agency or outside the agency, and they have to document the response to the comments.
And then you have a policy in the records retention space of how Long do you keep those comments and the responses and the published rule and any revisions over the years?
So that's an extremely tedious, meticulous approach.
But the principles are applicable outside of the government. The principles of keep track basically is what we're saying. That's the idea here. Keep track of this was version one, and Lee drafted it and then Maura edited it. And now Lee took back the comments, he talked to Jeff, and Jeff had different ideas. He reconciled all the comments, and now we have version two.
And now Mora is doing another review before it's published. And that's our official published version one.
And so it's not hard, but it's a lot of work.
And so when I started talking about a couple of episodes ago, I think I mentioned it's important to talk about to manage your IP through that full life cycle.
That's what I meant is how do we do that work and, and how do we make that easier for people, for ourselves in this case, but for our clients? And one way is write down the steps. What are the steps in our life cycle, our IP life cycle? We have Create, document, protect, use, monitor and disposition kind of top level steps. Some of them break down a little more.
Under Create, for instance, you might have draft review that might iterate a couple times and then finalize.
You might have a publish step that comes after document, maybe after protect, but before utilize, before use.
Because it depends on if you want to, if you think your IP is valuable enough that you want to register it, right, With a copyright office or the trademark office or something else.
We're talking about documents, but it could be something physical and you want to patent it.
Those government agencies are in place to help you protect your IP so other people can't look at it and say, hey, that was a great idea. I think I'd like to build the same thing and sell it for cheaper and make some money off of you.
So the documentation step is really important and that, the protection step, that legal protection step is really important.
And then you go to publish because you need to document and protect it before you put it out there in the world.
And then you start using it. And there's a lot of different ways to do it. You can use it yourself internally, you can use it for clients, you can sell it, you can license it to partners for, for money or for free. There's a lot of different things and over time you might be updating or revising it, which might send you back to that create step where your draft, review, finalize, document, Protect, maybe update your registration and then publish again.
So you can do that manually? You can. And small businesses do it all the time.
We're doing it that way.
But it's hard.
Like it's hard. And we know how to do it. We know the steps and we know the process. And it's still hard.
So I want to, I want to ask you a question, Lee.
We've been building content for our academy for a couple of years now.
And you've been managing a SharePoint site to keep track of what we're building.
How's that process gone for you?
[00:10:26] Speaker A: It's okay.
It started out one direction and it ended up in a different direction. And so that caused some folder structure issues when it came to how and where we should save things.
So the records managers children are having problems.
But no, it's because we went from one process to another. And I think that's typical in any organization.
Not only that you change from one process to another or how you're thinking about doing and saving things, but also take into consideration 20, 30 other people in your organization and they have their own way of filing things, so forth. So like I said, it's. It's worked itself out, it's cleaned itself up. But the start, it was great.
Here's where we put everything. And then we ran into a problem because we had updates of over updates and we had different people that got involved. And so we didn't have a process that was down, that was defined.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: Yes. Which I think is typical, like you're saying.
And I really liked one thing you said there, which is we changed our process midstream and over time. We have always said that focusing on process is the best way to organize information.
Organize information to support your process. So then if you have a process change, you do have to have an information organization change.
And that's what happened.
And that's okay because we recognized the problem for one, and we adapted. We adapted kind of on the fly and in the run, like in the moment.
But we did know that. We knew that we were making quick decisions in order to meet a deadline. And we also knew that we had to go back and fix it.
So yes, you're right. The poor cobbler's children records manager over here.
We are in the midst of a change, but we're aware of it.
I know that I've said on this podcast before that in the world of library science, it is well documented that two different catalogers will follow the same rules of cataloging, sit next to each other, follow the Same rules, looking at the same piece of published work and categorize it differently, kind of at the very end, the top levels are very clear, but it's at the end when you get to the details of the subject matter or the details of something else, and then the same cataloger will also do the same, could do the same document differently on two different days.
And so those changes are expected.
And the important thing is to be aware of them and keep the process as the center, the centerpiece of how you're organizing it.
So one way is this way, the hard way, the manual way. It requires active thinking all the time and then it requires you to stop and say, okay, I know we're in a hurry, but actually we have to make a change now before we keep adding to the problem.
Another way is to use software, content management software or other specialized sort of publication development. And publication software depends on your area that you're talking about. So if you're talking about software development, you might have a software control platform like JIRA or something else where you check in code, you check out code, it automatically updates it based on what you tell it that you're doing when you check it out and check it back in.
Content management software can do the same thing.
Learning management systems can do similar things for training materials, where you outline a course, you describe it, you name it, and then you create the components. And the learning management system helps you maintain the different versions and indications of whether they're active or inactive or are they appropriate for all audiences or some audiences, or how you're going to use them.
So in different areas, that same discipline, which starts at the heart of what we're talking about, create, document, protect, use, monitor and disposition.
There are specialized software packages that can help you do that. And if you're at scale, those are worth investing in.
Think about contract management and the templates that you use to draft contracts. Most companies have a non disclosure agreement because if you're going to work with anybody in a partnership kind of way, you don't want to, you want to protect your ip, you want to protect your trade secrets and your pricing and customer lists and things like that.
So you have your own non disclosure agreement.
Then you might have a slightly different version. You might have a one way non disclosure where you're just asking somebody to protect your information. You might have a two way non disclosure where you're going to share information with an equal partner and you want to protect everybody's information.
Over time, laws change, your stance on things changes you. You learn more about where your risks are and you need to update clauses in your non disclosure agreement.
But you want to keep track that you're on the right version. You don't want everybody naming it all themselves. Final Final. No really final 11, 27, 25 version 2 and not that we've seen names like that anywhere.
So the idea of even for something like a standard template to spend the time to put in the process how do we draft it, update it, finalize it and then once it finalizes, what's our process for making changes.
So contract management software solutions, many of them can do that for templates for different types of contract templates, whether it's a cell, a sell or a sales or purchase template, or a right of way template or whatever, you can manage the clauses, the clauses might change over time while the template the contract template itself is the same but you sub in clause version the indemnification clause version 2 instead of indemnification clause version 1 because it had to be updated.
You can take it down to that level of granularity if you have a system that does that. If you're doing this all manually, you're probably going to want to work on the document level because it just becomes too many pieces to manage in your own hands.
So guess my my wrapping up here is the principles are clear, the reason is clear and the how to is is tedious and it takes a lot of effort.
But thinking about your process keeping process at the center to me is the way to is the best path to success to protect this critical asset of your company.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: Do the work to stay organized.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: Do the work, don't put it off.
There's somebody, and I don't know who it was who said if you don't have the time to do it right, when do you have the time to do it over?
It's some business, you know, kind of pop culture business strategist type person. I'll look it up. But the that phrase has stuck with me even though I can't remember who said it is. And it's very true in the world of filing we see that all the time. If you leave your inbox to its own devices, your quick inbox quickly becomes unmanageable if you're not managing your IP and putting it through its paces of the life cycle.
If you had to go back and find the right version of something, it would take time. If you had to go back and demonstrate how long you had had this IP and what you've done to it over time, then that it would be difficult becomes okay. This is actually really important and we have to go spend a lot of time looking for it.
So.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:19:29] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:19:30] Speaker A: If you have any questions, send us an email at info trailblazer.us.com or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com. thank you for listening and please tune in to our next episode. Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion. Share it with people in your social media network.
As always, we appreciate you the listeners. Special thanks goes to. Jason Blake created our music.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: Also please like and subscribe our podcast and you might check out our Trailblazer learning
[email protected] until next time, thanks.
