This summer, an employee of the Coca-Cola Co. made news when she — along with two others — allegedly attempted to steal trade secrets from Coke and sell them to PepsiCo Inc. It’s not every day that a company goes public when someone tries to loot its intellectual property, but Coke’s decision to do so garnered national attention and illustrates the deservedly high value companies place on their intellectual assets.
When it comes to safeguarding your company’s intellectual property, what you don’t know can hurt you. To ease that (potential) pain, GC South asked several Atlanta-area attorneys to talk about what every in-house counsel needs to know about intellectual property. The panel’s wide-ranging discussion covered cybersquatting, assignment of rights — and one IP lawyer’s adaptation of comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck” monologue as a means to help identify patent trolls.
