Telecommunications services—those things that connect your corporate offices, data centers, e-commerce sites, call centers, and cell phones—are vital to most companies, and with multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts at stake, in-house counsel can help save company money through informed negotiations with potential providers. Learn the pricing and cost strategies, standard agreement pitfalls, and remedies to insist on (or avoid) in negotiating your next telecom services agreement.
"Put it in writing." Those four words used to be sage advice to parties looking to ensure their legal rights. The advent of technology and the essential reliance on computers to conduct business have made the traditional battle of the forms notion almost obsolete. Today, thanks to shrinkwrap, clickwrap, and other electronic agreements, there are a myriad of ways to form a contract, and even more ways to modify it. In a nutshell, contract management has become much more difficult in the digital age.
In many ways, when it comes to ecommerce, we as in-house lawyers are like first-time parents with infant clients. Although we and our children/clients are equally struggling with dramatic changes, the task of making the world safe for our little pumpkins falls to us.
Read this article to gain insight into EU privacy restrictions and to evaluate how you can best avoid a situation of noncompliance with these data protection requirements.
Would you feel comfortable if your company outsourced its key technology, ecommerce, or information management-related functions using agreements that did not cover the most critical contractual issues? Of course not. This article provides a "Top 10" list of important legal issues that you should address in technology, ecommerce, and information management outsourcing agreements. The list includes some issues that, although not necessarily new or unique to outsourcing transactions, are at a premium in such agreements. The article also provides some sample contractual language that you can use as a starting point to address key legal issues specific to your company.
Many companies are outsourcing such functions as information technology, accounting, customer service, and telecommunications. Additionally, many of them are contracting with foreign vendors to provide such services. This article explains the reasons for this phenomenon, examines the trends in global outsourcing, and sets forth factors that will help you to determine whether such outsourcing is right for your company. You will learn how to develop a strategy that will enable you to identify the vendor and outsourcing destination most appropriate for your needs and to sidestep the minefields involved in outsourcing globally.
Traditional manual analysis of patent documents is no match for the flood of patent data inundating your office. Despite limits, current automated patent analysis tools can help you stay competitive. This article describes the tools available and how you can apply them. You can start using these tools to support cutting-edge strategies, such as patent radar, precision patenting, and right-sizing of patent portfolios. You can create small, powerful, blocking patent portfolios that will discourage competitors while enabling you to forge new partnerships and prune deadwood from your patent orchard. Why use a handsaw when you can use a power saw?
Increasingly, non-IT companies are becoming "accidental" licensors, licensing their internally built accounting, inventory, human resources, supply chain, or other software systems in order to capitalize on these developments. If your company becomes a software licensor, you may encounter many important and problematic legal issues relevant to the modification, distribution, and protection of your code. They include the permitted use of open source code in commercial applications, clean room development, government rights in software created with government funds, intellectual property protection for software, reverse-engineering, and encryption export controls. This article analyzes these questions and more through familiar hypothetical scenarios.
Linking your corporate offices into a single intranet, while efficient, may expose your company to civil or criminal liability in other countries. Here's how to protect your company from these risks.
This article explains the intricacies of doing business in Europe, especially in the European Union, and the effects of the latest directives regarding ecommerce. The list of handy websites will help you research whatever question you’re facing at the moment regarding doing business in Europe electronically.