How to Patent Your Invention

If you believe an idea or invention you are working on will take off and be valuable to you, you need to protect it as your intellectual property. The way to do this might be via trademarks, design rights or binding non-disclosure agreements or you might decide to apply for a patent.

If you choose to go down the patent route, the sooner you begin the better, because it can be a long, drawn-out process. You would be wise to take on a patent agent so that you won’t make any mistakes in this process, which would be time-consuming and even more expensive than the average spend of around £5000 on an application.

The Process of Gaining a UK Patent

Initially, you must acquire an application form from the patent office, to be submitted with your full name and address, and a description of the product you wish to patent. Then you will have up to 12 months from the filing date of your application in which it will remain valid and you can continue. While this may seem a long time, you may need it for fine tuning and making manufacturing arrangements; even setting up the funding you need can take a while.

Your application can only go through to the next stage if you pay the search fee and file claims that properly define your invention. At this stage, a Patent Officer will search for anything similar that might be available to ascertain whether it is truly unique. The product must also be something that is new, useful and non-obvious. After that you can publish your application and all the technical details of the product.

The Patent Office then conducts a full examination with the benefit of the results of the search. If everything is satisfactory, you will be granted your patent. It might be four to five years from your initial application.

How the Patent Protects your Invention

Your patent will be granted in this country for a limited number of years, provided that you make the required regular payments to maintain it. It will make it illegal during that time for anyone else to make, sell or import the product, or copies of it. If anyone infringes the patent, you can bring a civil law suit against them, get an injunction to stop them, and claim compensation.

What your patent will not do is make money from the product. If the invention won’t do that for you there is little point in patenting it. If you want to talk this through with someone independent who won’t give away your intellectual property secrets, why not discuss it in the first instance with your local bookkeepers. Sometimes a listening ear is all that is needed, or they may be able to recommend someone who will help.

How to Deal with Reference Requests

When an employee gives you notice that they will be leaving at the end of the term specified in their contract of employment, you know that they will probably be requesting that you give them a written reference to pass to their new employer. You may also receive reference requests for past employees from their new employer.

You may think this is a perfectly natural request that you can easily fulfil, but there are some pitfalls to be avoided, as well as legal implications. Occasionally you may get such a request from a landlord or a bank considering issuing a loan or setting up a new account. Apart from a few exceptions in specific industries, you are not obliged in law to give references and are free to have a policy of not doing so. In this way you cannot be accused of unfair treatment of an individual if you refuse to give them a reference.

Wanting to be Helpful

However, you may prefer to be helpful to employees wishing to move forward with their careers by writing a reference for them. If you do so, make sure it is fair and accurate. Otherwise, if the impression you give is misleading in any way, you could be in trouble down the line. You can include a disclaimer of liability for any errors, but this would not always help if a former or current employee or someone else decides to take legal action.

Getting Agreement from the Employee

You must never issue a reference to a third party unless the employee has agreed. This is because it will inevitably contain some personal information and details the individual may wish to withhold. You could be in breach of the Data Protection Act if you release this information without the consent of the person concerned.

If the reference request enquires about the mental and/or physical health of the individual, you also need to get their explicit consent to divulge it. It’s best to get this in writing as evidence in case it should be needed later. Even if you are asked to state a number of absence days without giving reasons for it, you risk a claim for disability discrimination.

Sometimes an employee with whom you have been in dispute will have made a settlement agreement with you, and it may have set out the wording for a reference to be given.

Finally, your local bookkeepers would advise you that it is usually wise to send a reference to a specific addressee, rather than ‘to whom it may concern’. If it were to fall into unscrupulous hands there could be further trouble for you.

Insurance Act Now in Force, What Businesses Need to Know

The Insurance Act 2015 came into force on 12 August 2016. It is intended to make for a fairer balance of interests between the insured and the insurer.

Applying mainly to non-consumer policies where the insured is an organisation rather than an individual, it extends the requirements of the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012 even further by ordering that you have a duty of disclosure of material circumstances that you know, plus what you ought to know. At the very least you must declare enough information to let the insurers know they need to make their own enquiries.

What you Need to Know

This means you need to make efforts to find out all the possible risks that you need to disclose, and you should keep comprehensive records of this research, what it has revealed and where you acquired it. Often the knowledge you need doesn’t lie with just one person. Any member of your senior management team may be privy to it, also your risk managers and anyone else responsible for the company’s insurance, including external sources such as an insurance broker. To a lesser extent, this applies to individuals as well.

Disclosures must be clear, structured and relevant. You can’t just dump a load of documents on the insurers for them to sift through and find what is pertinent. Unless your presentation is indexed and signposted in a coherent structure, it will not be considered adequate. Nor should it be too brief, vague or ambiguous, as is pointed out in the Explanatory notes to the Act.

Permitted Penalties of Non-compliance

If you fail to find out and disclose what you should have found out through diligent research, insurers can penalise you in specific ways. If anything is proven to be deliberately misrepresented, the insurer can avoid the policy so that it is ineffective. It is unlikely that you will receive a refund on your premium.

If the misrepresentation is found not to be deliberate, and you can produce evidence that you tried to ascertain the facts that have since come to light, the insurer has options based on the situation as follows:

·         If it can prove that the policy would not have been issued at all if the facts had been known at the time, it can avoid the policy and refuse the claims, but the premium must be repaid.

·         If the risk would have been accepted and a policy written with different terms, the contract should continue as if those terms were included.

·         If the premium would have been higher, claim settlements can be reduced by an appropriate proportion.

Complying with Warranties

Some insurance contracts depend on action that you agreed to undertake at the time they were written, such as changing or adding locks or alarms. The law regarding non-compliance on this has now changed so that insurers can no longer cancel the policy completely and avoid any claims, but only suspend the policy when the breach of the warranty is discovered until you fulfil the requirements. You will then still be insured under the same policy. It will, of course, be advisable to document proof of compliance with the warranty with relevant dates noted.

Wise small business owners will want to be confident that they have the right evidence in place regarding both their disclosures and their warranties. You can always turn to your local bookkeepers for help on these issues. They will be delighted to give you the benefit of their experience with helpful advice and support.