From the course: Consulting Professional Weekly Tips

Work product vs. intellectual property

From the course: Consulting Professional Weekly Tips

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Work product vs. intellectual property

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- You need to understand the difference between work product and owned intellectual property. Work product is anything you produce specifically for the client. They own it after the project. You have no right to it unless that's specified in the contract. Your intellectual property remains yours to use on other projects as long as you protect it in the contract as preexisting work, or define it as something you can use going forward after the client engagement. Understand the differences between these two, work product and owned intellectual property. If you don't, you could lose the rights to some of your most valuable assets. For example, for my firm, we teach leadership training courses. We specify in our contracts that the content from our training courses is our preexisting intellectual property, and none of those rights are going to transfer to the client. We also do some limited consulting work. We've done work for one client where we wrote their strategic plan. That strategic plan was work product. The client owned all rights to it after the engagement and we had no rights to any of that content after the engagement ended. Here are a few ways that you can protect your intellectual property. Put preexisting intellectual property clauses in your contract. Insist that those clauses are in the contract or you won't sign the agreement. Mark all of your intellectual property as proprietary, every single page of it. Specifically call out intellectual property in your contract. For these courses, when I teach a course based on our intellectual property, the contract I have specifies that we retain the rights to that IP. Apply for copyright protection. Talk to an attorney who understands copyrights and intellectual property to find out how to protect yours. You need to understand how to protect your intellectual property and prevent it from becoming work product. Your IP is one of the most valuable assets you have. Protect it at every turn.

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