You know the familiar story. A couple of guys get together in a garage and start to build a product. They have some good ideas. They work hard. And five years later they are millionaires. 

Well, that was the good old days of the 1990s. 

Consider an updated version of the story. A couple of guys get together in the garage. They have a good idea. They work hard and start to sell their product. But before they get to be too big, along comes company XYZ, and there is a carbon copy of their program. Company XYZ didn’t steal their code. Instead, they monitored the marketplace, saw that some start-up was having success, looked at the functionality they had, and wrote their own version. Since company XYZ is approximately 10,000 times as large as the original entrepreneurial company, the entrepreneurs go out of business prior to breaking even. 

And that is how it goes in the new millennium. 

Enter a new player in the entrepreneurial team: the lawyer. That’s right, the lawyer. The lawyer is not a technician. The lawyer doesn’t bring any new ideas. The lawyer doesn’t bring any money. In fact, the lawyer costs money. The lawyer doesn’t speed things up. In fact, the lawyer slows things down greatly. So how did the lawyer get involved in the entrepreneurial team? 

The lawyer is there to protect intellectual property. To create patents and trademarks. And adding the burden of protecting intellectual property to the already heavy burden of creating and marketing new technology is like adding a 50 pound anchor to a rowboat and then trying to race across a lake. It simply is a huge imposition to the entrepreneurial process. 

However, if the entrepreneurs wish to succeed, hiring a lawyer is exactly what they need to do because it is not illegal for a large predatory technology company to watch for markets to develop and then come in with their own technology. Sure, that may seem unfair to the little guy, but it isn’t illegal. 

Only with legal protection can the little guy even stand a chance in today’s technology marketplace. 

And even armed with a patent, there still may not be much protection. First, patents take a lot of work, and the energy that goes into a patent could be going elsewhere. Second, patents are as slippery as little fish. You may think you have protection when in fact you don’t. A big company can find another way to achieve the same thing the little guy has done without violating the patent. Third, technology changes rapidly, especially for entrepreneurs. By definition, entrepreneurs are on the cutting edge. So by the time you finish the patent, you find that you have patented obsolete technology. Perhaps obsolete by no more than a day, but obsolete nevertheless. Thus, keeping the patent in sync with the technology being developed is a real challenge. 

Then there is the final fly in the ointment – a large company can afford massive amounts in legal fees and a small company can’t. Even if you have a patent and even if you are in the right, there is nothing to say that a large company cannot come along and ignore your patents, and then say, “See you in court.” The length of time to sue for patent infringement and the costs for such a suit are enormous. It simply may not matter who is right and who is wrong – it may only matter who has the largest and longest legal staying power. And that sure won’t be the little guy. 

As an entrepreneur, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. 

Fortunately, the big companies are complacent – for the most part. And fortunately, most big companies have at least a shred of decency. And for some large companies, if things get to be really desperate, there is the watchful eye of the government who under dire circumstances can start to claim monopoly. However, by the time the government gets involved, you can be sure that the road is littered with the wreckage of scores of entrepreneurs and scores of good ideas. 

Which takes us back to the beginning.

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