Protecting and managing your intellectual property (IP) rights or brand through an effective contract compliance and royalty audit programme is often critical to the success of a solid business partnership between the IP rights owners and their licensees / business partners. For IP rights owners, not regularly monitoring your royalty income can result in significant revenue leakage.

Whereas in the past, royalty audits were seen as a sign of distrust between the licensor and licensee, nowadays they are increasingly viewed as best practice by all parties in any licensing relationship. After all, most well written license agreements do have a right-to-audit clause agreed and signed by both parties. License audits

Our licensing experts help clients identify and successfully recover any contractual under-payments due through license compliance examinations, royalty audits and expert independent advice. We have experience in royalty and license audits across the globe in industry sectors including entertainment & media, character merchandising, publishing, luxury & sports brands, pharmaceutical, technology, franchising and media advertising.

Potential Benefits

With a typical audit covering a period of between 2 to 4 years of reported revenues, benefits  of our services include:

• Significant cash recoveries from findings identified and improved future cash flows which very often exceed the cost of the audit;
• Increased transparency;
• Validation of the completeness and accuracy of the royalty payments and expenditure;
• Highlighting unclear terms and opportunities for contract renegotiation by working closely with client in-house legal counsel;
• Improved controls for accurate future reporting by the licensees;
• Improved relationship between licensor and licensee / business partners.