The lawyer did it. The lawyer is responsible, so he described not only the employee’s functionality in a job description, but also the expected results of work, the employee’s duties, e.g., using pers

The entrepreneurs keep already in mind that they need to assign a lawyer with the task to produce an employment contract and job descriptions for employees who create intellectual property.

The lawyer did it. The lawyer is responsible, so he described not only the employee’s functionality in a job description, but also the expected results of work, the employee’s duties, e.g., using personal login and password to enter the workstation, repositories, task trackers.

However, this is only part of the system for creating and recording intellectual property. An essential element of this system is the Policy on Intellectual Property Items.

Below we will briefly list the issues to be included in this policy. Here we will focus on who, besides a lawyer, is interested in the Policy on Intellectual Property Items. It is definitely of interest to the company’s Chief Accountant and CFO. The lawyer writes the policy primarily in view of the civil law, while the CFO and the Chief Accountant in view of other criteria, such as IFRS.

The CFO is interested in identifying and accounting for intangible assets, including for the purposes of increasing the balance sheet asset.

The Chief Accountant is interesting because his/her task is to determine the book value of an item, and place the same on the balance sheet. To do so, the CA, even before the completion of the item development, accounts for the costs of developing intellectual property. Therefore, the CA should be notified of the commencement of development of the item, as well as of the intended period of development (long development may lead to overpayment of taxes, because the costs of developing the item are not used to reduce profits, but are accumulated in a separate account). Such costs accumulated by the CA will constitute the book value of the intellectual property item.

This simple example shows that the Policy on Intellectual Property Items is an important document the creation and implementation of which involves not only lawyers, but also other departments of a company, including accounting and finance departments.

• describing a task, accepting an item created, notifying all interested departments;
• a register of documentation created in the course of creating intellectual property, and the responsible department;
• the ability to use open source, photo banks and other databases with intellectual property items;
• rules for using repositories and task trackers;
• rules for registering rights to items that are created outside of business hours on personal devices;
• issues of remuneration, amounts and payment procedure;
• escalation of identified violations;
• sanctions for violation of the policy.

The policy is relevant not only for IT companies that create computer programs, databases, etc. It is relevant for companies that develop advertising, marketing materials, and various types of consultancy. The latter could create methodologies to be used in the provision of services. Methodologies may be protected as a trade secret. For example, recruitment methodology.