Most of our clients have their IP assets in the core of their business. The adequate management of their IP involves ascertaining the company’s intangible assets, designing management processes to safeguard them, and utilizing the IP assets to help determine their competitive edge. Seven Eighths helps leading industries assess their IP management strategy and develop a compliance policy that ensures they extract full benefit of their assets. We also help them building the awareness and positive perception of their IP value by end users and the channel ecosystem.

As part of our commitment to clients, we offer our expertise to partner companies and IP right holders to assess, develop, improve and optimize their licensing compliance policy and ensure its consistency with the IP management strategy. Compliance policy should aim to provide best protection to intellectual property rights and ensure the adequate business framework with customers, end users and channel ecosystem. Compliance policy definitions cover detailed analysis regarding the options and strategy of compliance assurance, communication regarding obligations and conditions, monitor behavior of licensees, verification mechanisms and non-compliance consequences.

Our experience in the development of complex compliance policies oriented to global software publishers and our contribution in managing compliance activity around the world for several industries, allow us to be leaders in the definition and development of state of the art compliance policies.

The core of our activity. More than a decade of experience working for top software publishers and leading consumer and entertainment industries around the world helping these industry leaders manage their license strategy and their compliance activity: from the conceptual design through the execution. Every initiative is carefully designed, implemented and executed with the adequate mix of elements and always considering all pertinent perspectives (legal & IP, technical, business, consultancy and marketing).

Our license management and compliance services cover every detail of the initiatives, including targeting (segmentation, profiling scoring), engagement, investigation, discovery, measurements, factual verification, compliance analysis, results sharing and findings positioning, negotiation and resolution.

IP holders that are focused on incremental business prefer to outsource the entire intellectual property and license management and compliance activity, trusting in our firm to develop and drive strategies that ensure the intellectual property protection, the licensee’s compliance and the maximization of business through revenue generation. Special care is taken on customer satisfaction and long term business relationship.

Normally, full IP license management and compliance activity involves the design and definition of the strategy, policy, contractual framework and the development of initiatives in a holistic approach, including investigation and detection of possible non-compliance customers, the targeting and segmentation of customers, the execution of engagements and the transformation of non-compliance situations into revenue opportunities for our clients.

The selection of potential targets to whom an IP holder wishes to address is one of the cornerstones of the license management and compliance activity. The targeting strategy involves segmenting the market, choosing which segments of the market are appropriate, determining the goals to be reached and the initiative that will be executed in each segment.

The success of a license management & compliance initiative starts with the targeting phase. We provide solutions to large companies that have a huge number of licensees and/or end-users typically scattered in different geographies. The adequate segmentation of the customer base, the profiling of potential targets and the selection of the most appropriate and potential targets from a commercial perspective is one of our best abilities.

Our global presence and multilingual capabilities allow us to provide a unique set of benefits to outsource the front office (customer facing) management & compliance activity. We can act as an extension of IP holders license compliance force, using its process, tools, methodologies and standards, quality and company philosophy.

We address global license management and compliance activities from a local perspective, with highly qualified native speaking consultants. Our activity resources execution model is agile, efficient and scalable.

License management & compliance activity is intertwined with the legal and contractual framework. To confront this reality, we design, implement and lead the execution of global IP management strategies which cover the best legal protection for our clients and engage both channel and end users in compliance activities; we also understand and accurately evaluate the concerns and situations at the end user organization during the compliance process.

The multidisciplinary character of our firm permits a holistic approach to any legal question posed by our clients, examining any legal issue from all relevant points of view beyond the legal and rendering legal opinions that are pragmatic and useful for our clients in real business cases. Our legal team supports our clients´ in-house legal departments in all matters related to compliance, either as an outsourced service or including our lawyers as part of their internal legal team to provide support to the compliance activity.

Research and Development phase (R&D) is based on our vast experience in the design, development, implementation and execution of technical solutions that ensure the discovery, measurement and analysis of compliance situations.

We use sophisticated test labs and our R&D resources to replicate deployment situations. This includes over-deployments, intensive, integrations, multiplexing, hacking, cracking, tracking, and other different approaches to ensure discovery and measurement of non-compliance situations.

Our specialty is the design and development of tools, scripts, methodologies, processes and sets of audit/forensic actions in order to collect all types of technical information, evidences and traces needed to assess or validate the compliance situation.

Additionally, our technical team can support the technical activity through on-site and remote assistance, including the resolution of technical queries validation of consistency of information gathered and the technical analysis of the audit results.

We have a large experience transforming non-compliance situations into commercial opportunities (with both revenue and fostering long-term customer satisfaction). The compliance-marketing activity can be directed to customers that may require a better licensing understanding and/or need to optimize their licensing investments. This activity can also be addressed to companies or persons that are not using licensed software (illegal copies). The activity in the first segment is focused on compliance marketing, in the second it is called antipiracy marketing. With our legal marketing initiatives, i.e. education and awareness initiatives that aim to reinforce the fidelity of customers, the understanding of the value of the IP and how to mobilize non-compliant users to regularize their situation we can address the larger part of the market.

Our marketing and communication solutions include the communication strategy on license compliance, reputational risk assessment, legal marketing strategy, market research and investigation, assessment on potential revenue conversion, qualified leads generation, compliance marketing campaigns, antipiracy-marketing initiatives as well as legal marketing strategies (including educational and awareness campaigns).