Using Seminars to Convert Prospects For Intellectual Property Legal Professionals Into Clients

A couple of weeks ago, I got a letter from a law firm inviting me to a seminar covering employment law. Now, I am sure the content for the seminar was pretty good, but the letter came out of the blue but this topic is not a key issue for me right now.

I want to use this experience to discuss how Intellectual Property Lawyers can use seminars more effectively to get high-quality clients.

The three major questions you have to think about when planning seminars are:

1. What information will you provide that will really improve your prospects' lives or show them how to take away any fears and frustrations? 2. How do you attract prospects who really want to listen to what you have to say? 3. How do you attract prospects with the money to pay for the services you offer now?

Intellectual Property lawyers first have to build a list of opt-in prospects within their target niche(s), and then provide relevant information to this list that shows them how to eliminate any Intellectual Property-related problems they face..

Before sending out any invites to seminars, IP legal professionals have a bit of work to do. First of all, think about YOUR desired outcome from the seminar. Basically, you want the seminar to convince prospects that have not bought your services yet to do so. For many IP legal professionals, seminar invites are the first point of contact in their lead generation campaigns so they want prospects to buy services AFTER attending the seminars.

Given this, you want to avoid a key mistake many IP legal professionals make when trying to use seminars to attract new clients...selling the seminars before getting into their prospective buyers' minds and building relationships with them.

Now, you may ask why this is necessary. You could simply get names from a list broker and do a marketing campaign to advertise the seminar. True, but the whole purpose of this article is to show how you can improve your success rate in terms of lead generation and client attraction.

So I will highlight some key messages related to this:

1. Find out the conversations going on in your prospects minds. 2. Make sure you develop effective multi-step campaigns to prospects within a specific niche to advertise the information you have that they are looking for, or point them to where they can find it. 3. Build your position of authority within your target niche by giving your prospects free information that shows them how to solve their IP problems or at least explains difficult concepts into easy to understand formats (at this stage, you don't discuss the services you offer). This can be done via blogs, free reports, articles, etc. 4. Build your opt-in list by capturing customer details and then make sure you provide much-needed information to your list on a regular basis (e.g. via newsletters, email bootcamps, free reports, etc).

If you are an Intellectual Property lawyer that has failed miserably in the past to get enough clients from seminars you previously run, then go through the four steps above first before inviting people to seminars. This will improve your response rates, and fortunes.

And this is why...by going through the steps above, you market your seminars to potential attendees that have already made the decision to give you their details so that you can interact with them and give them valuable information. If you have already shared valuable content with prospects by the time you make them aware of the seminars (e.g. via blogs, reports or emails), you will have demonstrated the fact that you know your stuff, are willing to focus on building relationships with people and know what your prospects' needs are.

And here is another fact - you don't have to run FREE seminars. If what you are going to provide during the seminar is extremely valuable, then the prospects on your opt-in list will recognize that, and will pay to attend. If you run free seminars, you will always have people that attend even if they have no intention whatsoever of ever buying from you. You want to get those that want to do so, and are willing to make a financial commitment (which does not have to be huge) to learn how to take away any pain they are under.

Some Intellectual Property legal professionals will claim to have done well running free seminars to cold lists. That is great! Remember, I am not saying this strategy would never work. I am just pointing out that you can get a significantly better response to seminar invites if you build relationships with your prospects first as I have outlined above.

Think about this as well...If you are having two-way conversations with prospects, you can tailor your seminars more effectively to give attendees information they really want, and are willing to pay for, because you know what is important to them (not you). It also gives you the opportunity to prime them so that they attend the seminars with a certain level of knowledge regarding Intellectual Property law that they want to have to solve their problems.

This means a change in business model for many businesses, in which you use seminars to 'close the deal' with prospects you have already built relationships with, rather than using them as an initial lead generation tool.

If you automate the communications to your opt-in list, you will find this is a much easier strategy to get high-quality leads as opposed to simply trying to target prospects who have never heard of you. That is hard - cold calling is just not comfortable and most of the people you target don't want to be sold to. They want the option to learn from you, interact with you and to then decide to ask you for your services rather than the other way round.

Benefits of Understanding the Value of Your IP   Starting Your Career As An Intellectual Property Lawyer   Do You Need a Lawyer to Respond to a UDRP?   What Is the Protection of Business Names Under Intellectual Property Law?   Hire Patent and Trademark Attorney to Accelerate the IPR Procedure   Every Innovative Irish Idea Deserves to Be Protected Correctly in Law   

Managing Intellectual Property Rights and Contract Law

Intellectual property rights are by their nature restrictive rights. Rights owners are granted the power to prevent third parties using their intellectual property without their consent. When it comes time for materials in which IP rights subsist to be exploited, it is the law of contract that is called upon to do permit to use the materials, subject to the conditions of contract.

Contract Law

A contract is simply a legally binding agreement. Parties to contract are at liberty to agree to what may take their fancy and the terms that may please them. The law imposes limitations on what may be contracted for when the courts find that an agreement is contrary to public policy or otherwise restricted by statute. With this background, owners of intellectual property are free to agree to deal with intellectual property in any way that they see fit.

Contractual Dealings with Intellectual Property

Dealings with intellectual property take two basic forms. Firstly, intellectual property rights are personal property, which means that they may be assigned to another person, subject to very limited exceptions. An assignment of intellectual this property rights conveys the title to the rights to another person. Far more frequently however these personal rights are licensed to other businesses for a limited purpose or a limited period, in accordance with the particular terms of contract. Amongst many others, movies, music, software, architectural plans, trade marks, designs, patents may be licensed to businesses or the public at large to use them subject to specified conditions and limitations. These licenses, which are in essence permissions, allow the licensee to perform some act in respect to the intellectual property that would otherwise amount to in infringement of the owner's intellectual property rights.

In the commercial environment contracts allow such dealings to happen.

Copyright Law

Copyright is the palladium of product of the arts, such as manuals, computer programs, commercial documents, leaflets, articles, song lyrics, sound recordings, photographs, film, sound recordings and many others. Businesses that trade using copyright works such as these are entirely reliant granting licenses to their customers on specified terms to trade using their stock in trade.

Contract law allows these companies to restrict and limit use of these copyright works to a fine degree. For instance a photograph might be licensed for use in print media for a set price and electronic media for an entirely different price, or indeed prohibit these uses in their entirety.

Patent Rights

Of all the different types of intellectual property rights, it is patent rights that provide the most extensive and complete monopoly over inventions. Products and processes which are inventive may be patented. As the monopoly rights granted are so extensive, so the bar to surpass for registration is higher than any other form of IP protection. Use of patent rights may be managed in the same way as other intellectual property rights.

Confidential Information and Know-how

A common form of license is that granted by non-disclosure agreements. Non-disclosure agreements are legally binding contracts designed to impose restrictions upon information released to another person, pursuant to the terms recorded by the agreement. In the absence of a non-disclosure agreement, the discloser of information would be left with their rights under the general law to protect the information released from unauthorised disclosure or use. The general law requires a claimant must show that the circumstances of the case justify the court finding that the information (1) retained the requisite quality of confidence, (2) was imparted in circumstances importing an obligation of confidence, and (3) that the information has been misused. Establishing such circumstances requires meticulous preparation of evidence. Thus in the vast majority of cases proving to the satisfaction of a court that trade secrets or confidential information have been misused is an onerous exercise.

Contract law simplifies this. If it were the case that a contract has imposed obligations of confidence between the parties, the discloser is not simply left with his rights at general law. The non-disclosure agreement imposes separate and independent rights to the general law, and indeed when properly drafted, may far exceed the rights that a claimant would otherwise be left with under the general law. As with other types of contracts, non-disclosure agreements may be framed to allow different types of uses of the information released - what those terms are rely upon what the parties intend to achieve.

Trade Mark Rights

The law of registered trade marks and unregistered trade marks protect brands, business names, logos, slogans, packaging and shapes in many instances. In industry, service marks and collective are also able to be registered, creating a device to set a standard of service and recognition that becomes associated with a particular standard of quality. Again, use of contracts allow businesses to license use of trade marks to other businesses; it may be that a licensor wishes to impose particular restrictions on the size, colour, geographical location or even the place on a website that a trade mark will be used. Provided these requirements may be reduced to writing with sufficient clarity they may form part of the contractual relations and effectively restrict use of the trade mark. For example, franchises depend on trade marks to create a common branding, as do businesses authorising others to manufacture packaging.

Commercial Environment

When it comes time to make commercial decisions as to the types of uses and licences that will be granted in respect to intellectual property, companies would be well advised to ensure that that contract accurately reflects the commercial intentions of the business. Failures to do so may have dire commercial and indeed legal consequences. Problems may arise by a variety of different courses.

For example, a company may inadvertently accept terms and conditions of the other business printed on the back of a purchase order authorising the payment. In such cases, the licensor's own terms of business may be found not to apply. The consequences of this are that the business contracts on unforeseen terms of contract that may well be contrary to its own intentions, and result in foreseen consequences. In one case that the author has advised on, the author of a University course inadvertently transferred the intellectual property rights to a company rather than license its use. This placed it in a position whereby it had divested itself of the assets in which had invested significant capital expenditure, that it intended to use and re-use for years to generate income. It had assigned the ownership of the course to the other party inadvertently.

A company may wish to license a company to "use" certain intellectual property rights on restrictive terms. Difficulties may arise in the contractual meaning of the word "use" when it is not defined in the contract, and thus introduces ambiguity and uncertainty in the contractual arrangements between the parties. Where a licensor asserts narrow and restrictive rights for "use" and the licensee asserts broad liberal rights to "use" the work, unless there are other material in the contract indicating what the parties intended by "use", it is extremely difficult to ascertain what the parties actually intended to agree to. In situations such as these where intransigence sets in, litigation is required to resolve the dispute causing distraction and expenses that is otherwise perfectly avoidable.

Conclusion

Fundamentally management of intellectual property rights takes place with contracts. Licences and assignment of owners' rights may be coupled other objectives of the parties, for instance:

research grants and consequent dealings with the fruit of such research; funding arrangements and contractual commitments for exploitation; clinical trials and use of consequent results of the trials; fixing royalties for exploitation of intellectual property rights; commercialisation of intellectual property and revenue sharing arrangements granting of options over intellectual property grants for licences for evaluation of relevant materials, and onward licenses cross-licensing different intellectual property rights for mutual research or exploitation; and software licensing.

Like any other commercial contracts, dealings with intellectual property may be complicated. Frequently this is the case because the delineation of rights and use rights granted are set out in fine, granular detail. To truly appreciate the effect of such dealings, readers need to appreciate the particular types of rights that may vest in a particular form of intellectual property.

Benefits of Understanding the Value of Your IP   Starting Your Career As An Intellectual Property Lawyer   Do You Need a Lawyer to Respond to a UDRP?   What Is the Protection of Business Names Under Intellectual Property Law?   

Intellectual Property and the Economics of Entertainment

There's been buzz over the past few weeks concerning how Condé Nast, the New York Times, and other publishing companies are busily preparing digital versions of their various publications. The gist is that they want to be ready for the only-rumored, yet heavily hyped, Apple Tablet. Apparently, the Kids From Cupertino have achieved such a level of credibility that corporations will pour money into preparing for a tablet-style computer that Apple might be thinking about launching maybe next year.

Here we have one more piece of evidence to indicate that the written word has begun its unavoidable migration from paper to the digital media. Good news for tree huggers; bad news for Hammermill, Champion, and anyone who owns a printing press. Not that the tactile enjoyment of a glossy magazine or well-produced book is likely to be replaced by a sterile LCD screen any time soon. And we won't be closing libraries and replacing them with giant servers in the foreseeable future. Of more immediate concern, however, is the effect the presumed Apple Tablet and the all-too-real Amazon Kindle may have on the source of all that content - the writers.

Over the past 20 years, digitization has changed the music industry. Album sales have declined over the past decade to the point where combined CD and download sales now represent only a fraction of what CD sales alone accounted for in 2000. Thousands of recording industry jobs have disappeared; so have thousands of retail record stores across the country. Today, the primary revenue source for the artists is live performances. Being a rock star ain't what it used to be.

Other forms of digitized entertainment, such as cinema and video games, are managing to hold their own against pirate attacks for the time being. But as books become easily shared digital files, how will the authors and their publishers be able to control unlicensed dissemination of the work? Will a Stephen King, a John Grisham, or a Dan Brown continue to produce entertaining works of fiction when the sales dollars begin to decline? Unlike music, there isn't a very lucrative market for live performances by an author.

There is no money in poetry, of course, and poets continue to write, don't they? The difference is that poets write for the purpose of self-expression, not to entertain others. A major difference between art and entertainment is that the latter requires a revenue stream to justify its existence. This isn't to say that works produced to entertain cannot also be art, but let's not forget that Shakespeare wrote plays to earn a living.

You cannot own what we call "intellectual property" any more than you can own an idea. What you can hold onto is the right to control the reproduction and dissemination of its physical manifestations - hence the term "copyright". Should writers and publishers be in a hurry to embrace a method of distribution so inherently vulnerable to illicit reproduction and sharing? If you had a novel going to press tomorrow, would you be willing to allow it to be published digitally as well? Do you see any way to protect book authors in the future... before they all turn to writing for the stage or screen? I'd be interested to know if you do.

By,

Robert Mattson

Executive Vice President- Creative Director & copywriter

Benefits of Understanding the Value of Your IP   Starting Your Career As An Intellectual Property Lawyer   Do You Need a Lawyer to Respond to a UDRP?   What Is the Protection of Business Names Under Intellectual Property Law?   Every Innovative Irish Idea Deserves to Be Protected Correctly in Law