Agreements will support business when they are modelled as operating frameworks for long-term, value-creating relationships, with governance structures that sustain trust, accommodate change, and keep the business productive when circumstances shift or unforeseen opportunities arise.
The legal profession has a well-practised instinct: anticipate conflict, allocate blame, define consequences. But agreements that are optimised for winning a future dispute are by necessity poorly optimised for building lasting collaborations and making innovation thrive. IAM works from a different starting point: the business the parties have come together to build.
Understanding of the business logic and the strategic direction will shape the commercial agenda: the collaborations, the partnerships, the licensing business, the strategic decisions for trade secrets and other intellectual assets. From there, the legal and contractual architecture must follow.
In the new digital landscape, every collaboration and every contractual arrangement must take into account the use of data and AI. The governance structures, together with the operational realities of the parties, will determine whether information can be managed in accordance with plan or if it is, in reality, being more widely shared than was intended.