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Get It Done:
Assess your IP before you meet with your attorney

You have worked hard to get your company on its feet. You protect it daily against a host of challenges. Are you protecting some of the most valuable assets of your company – your innovations?

Protecting your innovations through intellectual property (IP) strategies, including patenting, freedom-to-operate studies, trademarks, copyrights, employment agreements, confidentiality agreements and consulting agreements, are critical to the long-term success of your company.

Join Mary Lou Wakimura, Principal at intellectual property law boutique Hamilton Brook Smith Reynolds, in this Ask a Pro webinar, where she will introduce you to the tools you need to identify and protect your IP rights.

Here's what you will learn:

Identifying your company’s valuable IP
Recognizing the different trigger points for copyright, trademark, and patent protection
Determining if patenting your innovation is the right step for your business
Determining the best timing to protect your innovation
Creating a value proposition for potential investor

Bring your questions!

We are going to cover a lot of material very quickly. If you want to know how a particular point applies to your situation, you'll need to step up and ask the question. We'll do our best to let you ask your question directly so you can ask follow up points if need be.

You are invited to submit questions before and during the presentation. We will get to as many as time will allow.

Mary Lou Wakimura, Principal, Hamilton Brook Smith Reynolds

About your Pro

For close to 30 years, Mary Lou has been a patent attorney with Hamilton, Brook, Smith & Reynolds, P.C., assisting clients with patent preparation and prosecution, copyright registration and portfolio management. Her work in patenting technology includes one of the early spreadsheet patents and one of the earlier patents on fonts for printer applications, as well as patents for an artificial pancreas for diabetics and educational systems for autistic children.

Mary Lou also obtained patents for some of the first speech-to-text translation technologies. Outside of the firm, Mary Lou has contributed to the Women’s Bar Association (WBA), Boston Patent Law Association (BPLA), Licensing Executive Society (LES), the Asian American Law Association of Massachusetts (AALAM) and Women Entrepreneurs in Science and Technology (WEST). Mary Lou enjoys the opportunity to speak at local events that show the roles women can play in business careers.

About your host

Linda Plano founded Plano & Simple in 2010 to support her habit of coaching entrepreneurs on their pitches and overall venture development.

She has coached nearly 600 mostly high-tech entrepreneurs, and they have gone on to raise well over $250M. She has held positions as research scientist and CEO of startups and up to VP New Biz Dev for more established companies.

Linda is a co-founder and chair of the precursor to the Cleantech Open - Northeast, and has co-founded and run a dozen major investor pitch events while Associate Director of the Mass Tech Transfer Center. She is also a co-founder and co-chair of the MITEF Mentor Smart program.

Linda has degrees from MIT (BS Physics) and Stanford (PhD Materials Science & Engineering).

Join us if you've ever struggled with...

... how to protect your intellectual property or how to best leverage your time with your IP attorney.

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About the Ask a Pro webinar series:

Short on time or money?

You're an entrepreneur - of course you are short on both!

The Plano & Simple Ask a Pro webinar series was designed with you in mind: We bring you substantive presentations and interviews with experienced professionals who can help you get critical tasks done more quickly.

The Spring 2015 cohort of Mentor Smart mentees told us what they wanted to learn about, so those are the subjects you will find, biweekly, coming to you live!