Whether you’re starting a new venture, merging, acquiring technology, or investing in a new technology space, our team has the experience and expertise to ensure your success.

Freedom to Operate/Risk Assessments:

When defining or entering new technology markets, it is essential to clearly understand the competition and/or prior efforts in that space from both a business and technology perspective. Our attorneys have performed Freedom to Operate analyses to identify and assess risks, competitors, and potential roadblocks. We craft solutions that give our clients a clearer and more robust path forward.

State-of-the-Art/Competitive Analysis:

All too often, entrances into new technology spaces by startups and larger corporations are foiled by unknown and unexpected work or IP rights performed by others, either previously or contemporaneously.

Prior art searches can and should be about much more than patentability assessments. Understanding the technological state-of-the-art and competitive landscape sheds light on our client’s true technical and business differentiation, allowing them to hone their strategies and tactics.

Knowing what prior work and IP are out there, knowing who the stealth mode companies are and what they are doing, and knowing the existence and status of various skunkworks projects (past and present) can all yield potentially critical information, which is all too often publicly available and simply overlooked or ignored.

M&A Technology Evaluations/Due Diligence:

How often do M&As or other technology investments go wrong? Is it preventable? We think we have a better way.
From our perspective, properly performed due diligence is more than just checking assignments and ownership documents, which is all too often the scope of work attorneys on the deal are expected to perform. For us, due diligence is about more. Much more.

We strive to understand our client’s expectations and goals for the transaction, study the underlying technology and related assets in excruciating detail, and advise on whether the goals are aligned with the realities of the deal. Will the technology being acquired do what it is expected to do? Do the patents cover what the product does (sometimes they don’t)? Are competitors blocked from copying the product (sometimes they aren’t)?

Fountainhead attorneys have the requisite strong technical backgrounds, tenacity, and legal acumen to ferret out the issues that can undermine the initial value proposition and arm our clients with the information they need to ensure the deal produces the expected results.

Simply put, our attorneys put the “diligence” in due diligence.