What drives the most valuable businesses on the planet? It’s typically not their real estate or their tangible assets. It’s their intellectual property. In that light, protecting your brand shifts from a “to-do” to a “must-do today.” Attorney Andy Nelson shares how to be proactive in keeping your intellectual property safe from something as small as a social media post to something as large as your brand’s identity with a trademarked name, logo or slogan.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:00] This is The 19, a podcast that delivers marketing insights from Orange Label in 19 minutes or less. This year, the agency is celebrating 50 years of working with established brands that are driven by a fearless entrepreneurial mindset. What does this mean for you? It means enriched conversations and stories with marketing and leadership experts aimed at improving lives.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:28] Hello and welcome to The 19: Entrepreneur Edition! I’m Rochelle Reiter, President of Orange Label. Today, we’re talking about something that every entrepreneur can benefit from, and that’s learning more about intellectual property rights. The World Trade Organization defines intellectual property as “the rights given to persons over the creation of their minds.” Understanding intellectual property is a key part of being able to protect your brand and its exclusive identity. Here to share more about intellectual property from copyright and trademark protection to copyright infringement is attorney Andy Nelson. With decades of experience representing clients in business, commercial and intellectual property matters, and his clients have ranged from the food and beverage industries to advertising, technology, apparel and more. Andy, welcome to The 19. We’re so excited to have you here today.

Andrew Nelson: [00:01:18] Oh, thanks Rochelle. I’m excited to be here!

Rochelle Reiter: [00:01:24] So tell us about your background as an attorney and your specialty.

Andrew Nelson: [00:01:29] Okay. Well, I’ve been doing this 20 years now. I started out up in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, I guess, to be accurate. I came down here in 2003 and I’ve been practicing in Orange County ever since. I guess I’d put it in two categories what I’ve been doing my entire career one dispute resolution and avoidance for businesses. So that is garden variety problems that crop up to full fledged raging lawsuits, anything in between. I do help businesses try to avoid narrow and and resolve their little dust ups that that occur. And then on the other part of what I do, which kind of emerged out of my dispute resolution in the intellectual property arena, is developing a transactional counseling prosecution, if you will, intellectual property practice. And that I’ve built up over the last number of years. So I love getting in there and helping businesses understand what they have in terms of intellectual property, putting boundaries around it, identifying it and helping them exploit it and then helping them enforce it.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:02:27] Why is protecting intellectual property so important for brands?

Andrew Nelson: [00:02:32] Simply put, it’s it’s an asset so much like, you know, a business’s personal property. It’s, you know, it’s desks and inventory and things like that. And it’s real estate, which may be actual real estate holdings. It may be a leasehold, whatever it is. People understand those assets, these more intangible things. They’re treated like property in the law. But a lot of folks don’t understand that it’s treated like property. And the thing is, I think just about any business is going to have something, some kind of intellectual property that’s an asset for its brand. And, you know, the gates are kind of left open a lot. And in some cases, it may not be the most important asset for business...