IP due diligence surfaces all kinds of issues, but two that I find worth highlighting — particularly for companies in chemicals, materials, and consumer products — are trademark registration and patent filing timing. Both are straightforward to get right. Both are difficult or impossible to fix once missed.

Register the Brand. Don't Rely on Common Law.

Yes, U.S. trademark rights arise from use. But in consumer products and specialty materials, brand equity is the business — and relying on unregistered rights is reckless. It's not hard to imagine the scenario: a company builds significant brand equity around a product line, never files a federal application, and then discovers during diligence that a third party has filed on a confusingly similar mark. At that point, the investor's first question isn't about the merits — it's about why the company didn't file. That conversation never ends well.

The practical risks are well known but still underappreciated. Common law rights are geographically limited to where you're actually selling — they don't extend one mile beyond your established market area. A federal registration, by contrast, confers nationwide priority from the filing date, creates a legal presumption of validity and ownership, and puts the entire market on constructive notice of your claim. Without a registration, you carry the full burden of proving ownership, priority, and likelihood of confusion — and you're largely limited to state-law remedies. With one, you have a straightforward path to federal court and access to enhanced damages, attorneys' fees, and injunctive relief under the Lanham Act.

For companies in our space, the stakes are particularly high. If you're building a brand around a proprietary textile finish, a novel polymer formulation, or a consumer-facing product line, that brand name becomes the primary identifier in distribution channels, retail partnerships, and licensing agreements. Losing it doesn't just mean legal costs — it means renegotiating supply contracts, reprinting packaging, and explaining to your investors why your core commercial identity is in dispute.

The filing fees are trivial relative to the risk. Register early, register internationally where your distribution footprint demands it, and don't treat it as something you'll get to after the next funding round.

Absolute Novelty Will Cost You Markets You Can't Get Back

In chemicals, materials, and textiles, the path from R&D to commercialization is long enough that companies often assume they have time to sort out patent filings. They don't — and the consequences are worse in our industries than in software because the markets are global and manufacturing is cross-border by nature.

In the U.S., an inventor's own disclosure triggers a one-year grace period — file within that window and your own disclosure won't count as prior art. But that grace period is a distinctly American feature. Under the European Patent Convention, the state of the art includes everything made available to the public before the filing date — full stop. There is no general grace period. An inventor's own disclosure destroys novelty just as effectively as a competitor's publication. The only narrow exceptions cover evident abuse or certain international exhibitions, neither of which applies to routine commercial activity. China, Japan, and South Korea all apply similar absolute novelty standards with only limited exceptions.

And in our space, "disclosure" includes things companies do reflexively: presenting a new polymer formulation at a trade conference, publishing a technical data sheet for a novel textile coating, or sharing detailed specs with a prospective manufacturing partner without an NDA. Under the AIA, the prior art includes anything described in a printed publication, in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public — and the activity doesn't have to occur in the United States to qualify.

It's easy to see how this plays out: a spin-off’s marketing team publishes technical white papers on the carved-out technology before IP counsel files the provisional. Every jurisdiction with an absolute novelty bar now treats that content as prior art. The company enters its first fundraise with a patent portfolio that's narrower than anyone on the deal team realizes — and the gap surfaces only when the investor's patent counsel runs a prior art search. That's not recoverable.

The foreign filing calculus compounds this. A U.S. patent does nothing to prevent a competitor from manufacturing your formulation in China or selling your coated textile in the EU. If your supply chain or customer base extends beyond U.S. borders — and in chemicals, materials, and consumer products, it almost certainly does — you need a PCT filing within 12 months of your provisional to preserve the priority claim. That buys you up to 30 months from the priority date to enter the national phase in over 150 countries, with some offices allowing 31 months — valuable runway to raise capital, validate markets, and decide where prosecution costs are justified. But the 12-month priority deadline is absolute and non-extendable. Miss that window and your international optionality is gone. Sophisticated investors will see a U.S.-only patent strategy for what it is: a gap.

The practical discipline is straightforward: file provisionals before any public-facing disclosure, calendar the 12-month PCT deadline as a hard constraint, and align your IP timeline with your product launch and trade show schedule — not the other way around.

The Bottom Line

These aren't theoretical risks. They're the issues that reliably surface during diligence and — if unaddressed — either kill deals or compress valuations. The good news is that the fixes are straightforward and relatively inexpensive when handled proactively. The bad news is that most of them are irreversible once missed.