Does my company have any material intellectual property (IP)? If so, what is it, and how do we protect it? Unfortunately, often businesses cannot correctly answer these questions, failing to recognize valuable IP rights they own, and therefore, failing to appropriately protect those rights. For example, a company may not appreciate they have a protectable trademark, or that their website design and code is copyrighted, or that their method of manufacturing is patentable. Your customer lists and business methods may be trade secrets. The point is, you will have a difficult time protecting assets you don’t know exist, and the cost of ignorance may be high (e.g., patent rights are lost on an invention if a patent application is not filed within one year from the invention’s first use or sale).