The increasing importance of intellectualproperty issues in outsourcingpresents both land mines andgold mines for general counsel guidingtheir companies through contract negotiationsand transaction planning. Some IPissues are hidden in plain sight. Others areover-the-horizon issues that need to be recognizedand planned for now.
IP is important,for different reasons, in informationtechnology (ITO), business process (BPO) and businesstransformation outsourcing (BTO), and especially in whatsome in the industry are beginning to call”knowledge process outsourcing” (KPO),which encompasses offshore drug development,biotech research, data mining andother types of processing, research anddevelopment. The failure to address IPissues can have unintended consequenceson both the business and legal level, andin some cases will deprive a company ofthe benefits it sought from outsourcing inthe first place.
