IP Assignment Agreement Tracking
Every employee and contractor who touches product code, designs or inventions is supposed to sign an IP or invention assignment agreement confirming the company owns what they create on the job, but that signature typically happens once, during onboarding, and then nobody checks it again — new hires brought on outside the standard onboarding flow, contractors engaged through a statement of work rather than HR, and employees who transferred in through an acquisition can all end up working for months or years without a signed assignment on file. The gap stays invisible until a due diligence process or a funding round asks for the company's IP ownership chain, and discovering a missing signature from someone who's since left the company turns a routine diligence request into a scramble to track down a former employee for a signature they may no longer want to give.
STARTING PRICE
From €299
Standard tier · Multi-step workflow with AI extraction/decisioning and 2-3 integrations.
Get a quote →Saves roughly 2-4 hrs/week for legal or people ops maintaining IP assignment compliance across an active headcount.
How the automation works
We build a register that cross-references every active employee and contractor against signed IP assignment agreements on file, flagging anyone in a role likely to create IP — engineering, product, design, research — who's missing a current, properly executed assignment. New hires and new contractor engagements are checked automatically at onboarding rather than relying on HR to remember a separate legal step, and the register is re-checked on a schedule so gaps from off-cycle hires, acquired employees or expired contractor terms surface before a diligence request finds them first. Flagged gaps route to legal and HR with the specific individual and role context, so getting a missing signature is a routine cleanup task rather than a crisis discovered during a transaction.
Process flow
- 01
New hire, contractor engagement, or scheduled sweep trigger
A new employee or contractor record in the HRIS, or a scheduled periodic sweep of the full register, triggers a check against signed IP assignment agreements on file.
- 02
Cross-reference roles against signatures ai
Active personnel in roles likely to create IP are cross-referenced against executed assignment agreements, distinguishing a genuinely missing signature from one that exists but wasn't logged in the tracked register.
- 03
Flag gaps by risk ai
Missing assignments are flagged with role and tenure context — a senior engineer with two years unsigned is a materially different risk than a new hire in week one whose paperwork is simply pending.
- 04
Maintain the IP ownership register integration
Assignment status for every active individual is maintained in a single register tied to their HRIS record, replacing a signed-document folder nobody actively audits.
- 05
Route gaps to legal and HR output
Flagged gaps go to legal and HR with the specific individual, role and tenure — legal decides how urgently to pursue a signature and how to handle anyone who's since left the company; the automation identifies the gap, it doesn't resolve it.
- 06
Log resolution output
Once a missing assignment is signed or a gap is otherwise resolved, the register updates and the resolution is logged for future diligence requests.
Inputs
- HRIS employee and contractor records
- Executed IP assignment agreements
- Role and department classification data
- Acquisition or transfer personnel records
Outputs
- IP ownership assignment register
- Missing-assignment gap report by role and tenure
- Legal and HR escalation queue
- Diligence-ready ownership chain documentation
Works with
Prefer a fully custom build instead of an off-the-shelf integration? We scope both options during your free consultation — most jobs like this one work fine on standard connectors, but higher-volume or non-standard systems sometimes need bespoke API work, reflected in the complex tier.
Where this goes wrong if you get it wrong
- Contractors engaged directly by a department through a statement of work, outside the standard HRIS onboarding flow, are the most common source of missing assignments — they never pass through the process that normally triggers a signature request, and tracking only HRIS-onboarded personnel will systematically miss exactly the population most likely to have a gap.
- An employee who joined through an acquisition may have signed an IP assignment with the acquired company under different terms, or none at all, and treating that prior agreement as automatically equivalent to your own standard assignment can leave a real gap in the chain of title that only surfaces when a specific patent or product's ownership gets questioned.
- A signature that exists in a folder somewhere but was never logged into the tracked register looks identical to a genuinely missing signature from the outside, and flagging it as a gap without a quick verification step against actual signed documents creates false alarms that erode trust in the register — verification needs to check for the document, not just for a database entry.
- This tool identifies who's missing a signed assignment and surfaces the gap; it does not determine what IP a departed employee without a signed assignment may claim rights to, or negotiate a resolution — that determination and any negotiation with a former employee requires legal judgment and should never be treated as a data-matching problem alone.
Frequently asked questions
Does this catch contractors who were never onboarded through HR?
It's built specifically to surface that gap, since contractors engaged directly by a department outside the standard onboarding flow are the most common source of missing assignments — but it depends on some record of the engagement existing somewhere to cross-reference against.
What happens with employees who joined through an acquisition?
Acquired employees' prior agreements are flagged for legal review rather than assumed equivalent to your standard assignment, since terms and coverage can differ meaningfully between the acquired company's agreement and your own.
Does the tool decide what to do about a missing signature from someone who's already left?
No. It flags the gap with full context so legal can decide how to handle it — the actual determination of IP rights exposure and any negotiation with a former employee is a legal judgment call, not something the automation resolves.
How often is the register re-checked?
New hires and contractor engagements trigger an immediate check, and the full register is re-swept on a recurring schedule so gaps from off-cycle onboarding or lapsed contractor terms surface before a diligence request needs the answer.