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Protection of Intellectual Property in Startup
Aside from competence of management team, control of intellectual property is a major focus of investor scrutiny. The ability to identify and protect intellectual property directly reflects on investor confidence and the resulting access to capital available to technology start-up. Protection of intellectual property assets is available through the law of copyright, trade secrets, patents and trademarks.
Financing Startup
Many startup companies, particularly in technology sector, require capital beyond the means of their founders in order to finance continued growth. Expenses quickly add up, and a business that cannot manage its cash flow will not survive. Because startup companies typically have a limited operating history and are considered to be risky ventures, obtaining even simple financing arrangements can be a difficult task.
Sports Contracts
Due to the widespread and much publicized incidents of incompetence, criminal abuses, and unreasonable fees in the sports representation industry, many athletes are increasingly turning towards lawyers for representation. Currently, over fifty percent of those actively involved as representatives in the three major professional leagues are lawyers. In the ongoing discussion among sports law scholars and practitioners of ethical problems in athlete representation, perspective is everything. For example, an agent who is not an attorney may have no problem with either (i) solicitation of clients or (ii) advising a client to sign a services contract, even when (iii) an apparent conflict is created because a percentage of the client's income from the contract will be paid to the agent.
A practicing sports attorney who is not an agent, on the other hand, sees problems in those activities: (i) solicitation by attorneys is generally prohibited, which implies that solicitation is problematic - of course, the prohibition against solicitation leaves the sports attorney at a distinct marketing disadvantage, so the rules of professional conduct, and not solicitation, might be perceived as the problem; (ii) the agent appears to be practicing law without a license, so the agent (from a lawyer's perspective) does have at least one unacknowledged problem; and (iii) there is a potential conflict between the agent's interest and the player's (even though agents routinely claim that their interests coincide with those of players).