Woodcock Washburn helps clients protect their intellectual property in the increasingly important business methods area. Our clients not only gain a competitive edge in the marketplace by protecting their proprietary business methods, but also realize additional revenue by licensing their patented methods to others.

Our attorneys work with clients' technical staff and business people to recognize, develop and protect business methods. We counsel a diverse array of companies that provide financial services, market services, electrical products, computer software, Internet applications, and consumer products, to name a few. Many of our firm's lawyers worked in other fields, such as engineering and computer science, before becoming lawyers. As a result, we bring a unique appreciation for business methods and a thorough understanding of how to generate revenue from them.

Some recent Woodcock Washburn transactions involving business methods include:

• Assisting a financial services company to identify and obtain patent protection for many of its financial services methods and insurance methods.
• Advising an electrical instrumentation company on obtaining protection on its methods for generating revenue from use of electrical instrumentation products.
• Counseling a disaster recovery company on protecting a network-based disaster recovery system for maintaining and executing business continuity plans in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster.
• Advising a securities company on domestic and international patents relating to on-line securities trading systems.
• Assisting software companies to protect methods of doing business with new software products and the Internet.