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IP Asset Evaluation for M&A Opportunity

Challenge

A market leader in graphics and productivity software continually explores strategic opportunities to expand, manage and strengthen its innovative portfolio of photo, video and DVD software products.

To better evaluate expansion opportunities—primarily software assets and products—and make well-informed business decisions, the client engaged UnitedLex to understand the scope of IP protection, assess liability risks, and provide technical due diligence support.

Solution

UnitedLex’s deep-dive on the codebase of the software assets—including detection and analysis of the open source footprint—ensured that our client had a clear understanding of the IP rights and risks involved in these investments. We uncovered a set of critical findings that enabled the client to determine the true value of each transaction.

  • The team found from 3% to 24% of open source content—with restrictive licensing obligations—distributed across 200,000+ lines of code covering five different products. These assets also had significant third-party commercial code from multiple vendors devoid of any contracts.

  • In a product with over 4M lines of code written in C/C++ and Java, UnitedLex found 25% open source exposure in the third-party code, leading the client to scrutinize the indemnity clause in the vendor contracts.

  • UnitedLex analyzed over 1M lines of code of a product in the online photo/video sharing space and detected 33% of ‘restrictive’ open source content concentrated in a select few modules.

Impact

Our client, with a successful history of strategic product acquisitions, decided against purchasing some of these software assets—potentially saving millions of dollars including the cost of remediating the high-risk components.

Optimizing
your IP Program:

3 steps for achieving greater ROI

Source Code Analysis leads to $67.5 M Verdict