Conducting a Cross-Regime IP Audit: A Practitioner's Guide to Inventory, Ownership Verification, Encumbrances, and Pruning
By Casey Scott McKay ·
This guide sets out how to run an intellectual property audit as a defined engagement with a defined output. It covers scoping, the interview method that produces the unregistered asset list, and reconciliation against office records rather than internal dockets. It then works the ownership verification sequence in detail, because that is where audits find damaging defects, and sets out the remediation routes for each of the recurring failures. It covers encumbrance mapping from contracts, open source review, the trade secret category inventory, and foreign portfolio treatment. It closes with a pruning method that survives contact with product management, a reporting format that produces decisions, and the governance controls that make the next audit cheap.
IP and Technology > General IP | Guide | Published 31 December 2025 - Updated 11 April 2026 | Casey Scott McKay - marksy.us
Summary. This guide sets out how to run an intellectual property audit as a defined engagement with a defined output. It covers scoping, the interview method that produces the unregistered asset list, and reconciliation against office records rather than internal dockets. It then works the ownership verification sequence in detail, because that is where audits find damaging defects, and sets out the remediation routes for each of the recurring failures. It covers encumbrance mapping from contracts, open source review, the trade secret category inventory, and foreign portfolio treatment. It closes with a pruning method that survives contact with product management, a reporting format that produces decisions, and the governance controls that make the next audit cheap.
Keywords: cross-regime IP audit · scoping an audit · asset inventory method · office record reconciliation · unregistered rights capture · chain of title verification · assignment language review · confirmatory assignments · recordation remediation · encumbrance mapping · contract repository · open source bill of materials · trade secret categories · foreign portfolio review · pruning methodology · maintenance budget · board reporting · privilege structure · remediation planning · portfolio governance
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