IP Protection Checklist for Engineering Teams

Use a CIIA (Confidential Information and Invention Assignment) agreement. Without one, employees may retain rights to inventions they create on company time. Free templates are available from Cooley GO.

Work-for-hire alone is not enough for patent rights. You need an explicit invention assignment clause. This is especially important for remote contractors in other jurisdictions. Read our guide on contractor IP clauses.

This means signing the CIIA, disclosing any pre-existing IP they are bringing in (or explicitly not assigning), and understanding the team's invention capture process.

Confirm that all work product has been handed over, that the departing employee understands their ongoing obligations (such as cooperation with patent prosecution), and that they have returned any proprietary materials.

Schedule a recurring review meeting. Walk through the last quarter's major features, architecture decisions, and novel algorithms. Ask: "Did we solve a technical problem in a way nobody else has?" That is the signal worth investigating.

Give engineers a lightweight way to say "I think this is new." A Slack channel, a form, or a tag in your issue tracker. The goal is to reduce friction to near zero. Most engineers will not fill out a 10-page invention disclosure form, but they will drop a message in a channel.

When something is flagged, you need a structured way to capture it. A good disclosure template covers: what the problem was, what existing solutions look like, what your approach does differently, and who contributed to the solution.

Commit messages, design docs, and architecture decision records all serve as evidence of conception. They establish who had the idea, when they had it, and how it evolved. This matters if inventorship is ever disputed.

Publishing code can publicly disclose whatever it actually teaches a skilled reader. In the U.S., an inventor's own disclosure generally opens a 12-month window to file. Most other countries have no comparable grace period. Review before you push, not after.

Engineers love sharing what they built. That is great for recruiting and community, but a talk that explains how a novel mechanism actually works can publicly disclose it. Screen presentations, slides, and recordings before they go out.

This is the single most important timing fact for engineering teams. If international rights matter, publicly disclosing the invention before filing can forfeit them in most jurisdictions, and the U.S. grace period does not extend abroad. The safe sequence is file first, publish second.

Know what your engineers are pasting into ChatGPT, Copilot, and other AI tools. Data handling varies by provider, product, account tier, settings, and contract, and it changes over time. Keep an approved-tool register and verify the current terms rather than assuming from the brand name.

Pasting an unpublished invention into a third-party AI service is a disclosure to that provider. That is not automatically a public disclosure in the patent sense, and it should not be described as one. What it can do is put confidentiality, trade-secret "reasonable measures," contractual obligations, and export compliance at risk, while creating a copy of your invention in a system you do not control. Treat it as a controlled disclosure that needs approval, not a routine tool call.

Tools that run locally (on your hardware, with your data staying on your machine) avoid the disclosure risk of cloud-based AI. Evaluate local-first options for code analysis and invention discovery. See self-serve scanning options.

Only natural persons can be named as inventors. Under the USPTO's revised guidance (Nov. 28, 2025), there is no separate AI-specific test: the ordinary conception standard applies, and inventorship turns on who conceived the subject matter that ends up claimed. Prompting, selecting, testing, and modifying AI output can all be relevant evidence, but no single one of those activities automatically establishes inventorship. Record what the human decided and why, not a conclusion about who the inventor is. Read more about AI and inventorship.

Finding a patent attorney after you discover a patentable invention is too late. The best time to establish the relationship is before your first filing. Look for an attorney with experience in software patents and your specific technology domain.

USPTO filing fees for a provisional are $65 for micro entities, $130 for small entities, and $325 for large entities. Budget for more than the fee. A provisional only supports subject matter it actually describes, so a thin filing that omits the architecture, the alternatives, and the technical effects may provide little useful support when you convert. The real costs are preparation time, drawings, attorney review, and the non-provisional or PCT conversion within twelve months. Read our provisional patent strategy guide.

Not every invention deserves a patent filing, and some are better kept as trade secrets. Weigh competitive advantage (does this differentiate the product?), revenue impact, defensive value, detectability (could you tell if a competitor used it?), and design-around difficulty. One factor teams routinely miss: a patent publishes. If the filing would teach competitors more than the resulting claims would realistically stop them from doing, secrecy may protect you better.