Legal 14

Providing you’ve established good, strong relationships with your colleagues, the intel you can gather about a business from successfully delivering an HR service is vast.

Throughout the pandemic, and especially after the pandemic, people’s mindsets definitely shifted. People have reassessed what’s important to them; not just in relation to work but life in general. This means a significant focus on health, wellbeing, and balance for HR. Keeping colleagues healthy and productive is key to any business, so long hours stuck at a desk, with no lunch breaks, should be discouraged at every opportunity.

For example, here at Ellisons Solicitors, we are a very family orientated firm and I’ve seen this strengthen in recent years, despite our growth.

We have introduced enhanced family-friendly policies, but it’s also about colleagues being encouraged to regularly get together. A balance between remote working and being with your team is imperative. Also, celebrations are so important to ensure people feel appreciated – and to enjoy themselves! Talking at length about our values and what it’s really like working here allows potential candidates to really decide if their values are similar to ours or not. This means we recruit the right people for us, and our values and culture only get stronger as we grow. We’re very clear on our identify and what we’re about, which is critical to a successful HR strategy.

It is a tough old market out there when it comes to recruitment, so HR Strategy needs to be focused on retention, and retention means flexible working practices, training and development, clear career progression, and fair and transparent reward that links to performance. It also brings the strength of your leadership team into sharper focus.

Different generations need different things to feel supported and productive at work, so well-trained managers who have the skills to adapt to their team and wtheir needs is critical.

In summary, to have a real business impact, HR Strategy is at the heart of your business strategy. It’s not an afterthought or an add-on. The success of any business will always be down to your people.

Lizzy Firmin

Chief Operating Officer, Ellisons Solicitors

ELLISONS SOLICITORS

ellisonssolicitors.com

Andrew Priest, Partner, Birketts

ASK THE LEGAL EXPERT Q&A

Q: We are a start-up company developing an innovative engine that will have significant environmental benefits. What should we be doing to protect our intellectual property and ensure that others cannot copy our technology?

A: Your IP will be very important for the business going forward, not just to protect others from copying your technology, but also as the basis for future funding and investment in the company. The IP that is worth focusing on the most are patents and trade secrets. If you can obtain patent protection for your technology, you should be able to use the patent to prevent others from copying your engine or producing something similar. It is also worth protecting your technology as a trade secret and there are certain steps that you would need to take in order to benefit from protection under the relevant regulations. It is important to make sure that you also have a robust confidentiality agreement (or NDA) in place before any discussions with anyone outside of the company commence, such as with a potential collaboration partner. Failure to do so could prejudice any subsequent patent application, but it is also a sensible way of ensuring that your ideas are not copied by others.

Q: We have developed a new type of energy-efficient wind turbine, but are finding it difficult to finance the last stages of the development. A large US company who say they can help us take the technology to market has contacted us. They have given us a very long contract to sign. What are the risks?

A: Contracts with US companies tend to be lengthy and difficult to read, but the key provisions are much the same as we would include in contracts under English law. That said, there are commercial risks as well as legal risks to consider. With regard to the commercial risks, it would be advisable to review the contract to ensure ownership of intellectual property remains with you, and that management control and day-to-day running of your company is not diluted in any way. The financial arrangements should be looked at carefully to ensure you can complete your development work as well as scale up the build or manufacture of your turbine. With regard to the legal risks, it is important to ensure that key clauses such as duration and termination, limitations of liability and indemnities, dispute resolution and data protection are included and appropriately addressed in the agreement. US law will probably govern the agreement, so you need to know the implications of that, especially if there is a dispute on the agreement at some point in the future.

Q: For the last few years, we have successfully been commercialising a sustainable carbon capture solution for the agriculture sector. We had some initial finance from grants and angel investment, and are about to embark on a larger round of fundraising. Are there any actions that we should be taking now before we start talking to potential investors?

A: It is important that all your paperwork and statutory books are in order before you start talking to potential investors. If any of your IP was initially developed by the founders of the business before setting up the company, make sure that there is a written assignment in place to transfer that ‘founder IP’ into the name of the company. It would also be sensible to look at the terms of those initial grants and previous investment agreements. They may have implications for the next round of investment, particularly if they give any preferential rights or require consents to be given. Your investors may also want to carry out a due diligence exercise regarding the company’s legal, financial and tax affairs, so make sure that your lawyers, accountants and tax advisers are ready to assist.

BIRKETTS

birketts.co.uk

andrew-priest@birketts.co.uk

IKVA PIONEERS A NEW GLOBAL ERA FOR BUSINESS INSIGHTS

IKVA

ikva.ai We may live in the Digital Age but tracking down the right data can still be incredibly difficult. Cambridgebased AI knowledge management company iKVA has developed quickfire software solutions for complex industry needs, as CEO Jon Horden explains.

It’s estimated that we spend at least 20 per cent of our time at work or study seeking information – a fact that iKVA founder, Dr Liang Wang, knows all too well. As a post-doctoral researcher at Cambridge University, he found it almost impossible to source the information needed for his research, thus sowing the seed of an idea for a new way of finding data quickly and easily. Search techniques have obviously transformed the way we look for and access information, but everyone uses slightly different keywords to find the same things, making it all too easy to fall down the online ‘rabbit hole’. And if you need specialist information, traditional searches don’t work well at all.

Dr Wang and iKVA co-founders Prof Richard Mortier, also from Cambridge University, and Prof Jon Crowcroft, of the world-leading Alan Turing Institute, set about building a Deeptech software solution based on the whole context of information, rather than specific keywords. The result is iKVA’s awardwinning Discover Platform, which uses vector-based technology to convert information from a vast range of sources, whatever the format and language (including documents, images, video, social media and even chat) to find accurate, relevant data in real time.

It’s the product of over “25 ‘man-years’ worth of research” as Jon puts it, with very exciting implications for business, particularly in the engineering, legal, commercial and developer sectors. “Our solutions are really useful for large complex organisations with information spread across lots of departments, teams and even individuals. They eliminate the risk of ‘silo working’ and help companies make better datadriven decisions at the right time. “For example, engineers typically deal with complex information in the form of large product specifications, manuals, customer briefs, contracts or tender opportunities. “A tender management team may get the chance to bid on a huge building project in, say, Bangladesh… but the tender document is 150 pages. “Our solution enables them to run through the entire tender – or sections of it – and access all relevant company knowledge straightaway. “There’s no need to try and guess relevant keywords, do searches in other languages or translate foreign documents. The bid writer can simply take the relevant section, drop it into our platform, and all the information needed to write the tender is then available in English.” iKVA also has a next-generation solution for traditional knowledge management and enterprise searches. Jon explains: “A data cleanup traditionally takes a huge amount of effort before the search can be installed. All the data must be in a common format, in the right directory, with correct tags, titles, and so on.

“Our systems take away all the ‘heavy lifting’ involved in traditional data clean-ups.

We recently indexed all the information held at Cambridge

University Library so they could install our system – and it literally took two hours!”

While the company is still relatively young – launching in 2019 – its solutions are already being used by prestige organisations such as engineering giant Mott MacDonald and Cambridge University Library. Earlier this year, iKVA took part in Europe’s first Deeptech demo day hosted by Deeptech Labs. This accelerator programme and venture capitalist fund has been established by Arm, Cambridge Innovation Capital, Martlet Capital, Ewan Kirk and the University of Cambridge for post-Seed, pre-Series A companies looking to develop their prototypes into scalable products and services. iKVA was one of just six companies invited to join the cohort from 1,910 companies across Europe, with the chance to pitch to an online audience of over 75 investors from 60 investment firms.

Jon says, “It was a privilege to take part in the event. One of the challenges with Deeptech companies like ours is the long incubation phase before we can take a product to market.

Jon Horden CEO, iKVA