Rees Morrison has consulted to more than 250 law departments (and several law firms) over 22 years to help them better manage themselves and their outside counsel. For more, visit reesmorrison.com, email me, or call 973.568.9110.

All posts (C) 2005-9 Rees W. Morrison.
If you would like a Metapost Plus: please email me with the name and I will send it.

Archive by Month

Archive by Category

Technorati Profile Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

« General ledger accounts for a medium-sized law department | Main | Budgets for internal departmental costs and their component expenditures »

Should the law department absorb in its budget patent and trademark expenses?

Yes, assuming the staff who handle the protection of patents and trademarks are part of the legal department, the costs of filing and renewing protection of those assets ought to be in the legal department’s budget (See my posts of Aug. 7, 2007: many international matters involve patents and trademark local counsel; April 10, 2006: total law firms retained ought to exclude local IP counsel; and Nov. 30, 2005: Computer Patent Annuities (CPA) and its services.).

Related expenditures, which are not as closely connected to originating and registering intellectual property assets, are investigation costs and “buys” to prove counterfeiting. Those costs are primarily business costs, with only occasional legal issues, so they should not be charged to the budget of the general counsel.

Posted on September 9, 2008 at 10:05 PM in Non-Law Firm Costs | Permalink

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Post a comment