Legal Documentation: The nitty gritties of keeping it legal.

Greshma Dhanarajan

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What comes to mind?

• Law• Jurisdiction• Authority• Rights• Lawsuits• Contract• Property• Court• Crime• Evidence• Security

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Overview

• What is Legal Documentation?

• Why do we need it?

• Who benefits from it.

• What we at Dell InfoDev do to provide legal documentation.

• Copyrights and Trademarks.

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Sample

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Introduction

• Legal Documentation is:– any formally executed written document that can be formally attributed to

its author,

– records and formally expresses a legally enforceable act, process,[2] or contractual duty, obligation, or right, and

– evidences that act, process, or agreement.

• Legal documents are printed or interactive online.

• Provides legal boundaries and usage parameters.

• Includes country-specific instructions based on the laws of that country.

• Dell InfoDev does not write but simply facilitates legal documents based on the intimation from our legal contact.

• We also ensure the updated documents are shipped with the new products.

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Legal Document Types

• Safety, Environmental, and Regulatory Instructions

• End User License Agreement

• Warranty and Safety Information

• Product Information Guide

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Why Do We Need It

• Justice for all

• The rule of law is better than the rule of any individual

• Mutual Protection

• Protection of intellectual property

• As part of that process, we ensure the following:– the intellectual property is properly owned by

the organization.

– the customers are contractually bound to handle the product and services within defined frameworks.

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Who Benefits

• The Company selling the product

• The Customer

• Resellers

• Customer Support

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What We Do

• Create and maintain the regulatory document set for each of our product lines.

• The documents contain guidelines for product use as well as technical specifications that the customer would need to know as soon as the product is received.

• We analyze the updates notified to us by the legal team and modify the documents, ensuring that the legal team approves of the final output.

• All legal content is proofed by InfoDev but require the core team’s approval before proceeding with any changes.

• InfoDev also ensures that documents that need to be printed get added to the list of items that go into the box during the product packaging. This is currently done using the Agile PLM tool.

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What We Do (contd.)

• The core team that we interact with comprises of POCs for the following aspects:– Regulatory

– Legal

– Environmental

– Safety and NOM

– Ergonomics

• InfoDev also seeks to reduce the cost of sustaining regulatory documents by – reducing content

– resizing the printed pages

– reducing ad-hoc revisions

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How Can We Add Value

• Editors

• Innovators

• Champions for content reduction and cost reduction

• Notifiers of any ambiguity or country-specific requirements.

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Copyrights and Trademarks

• Copyright– Literally “right to copy”.

– Is a form of intellectual property.

– Gives exclusive rights to the creator of an original work.

– Creator needs to be credited when the work is referenced.

• Trademark– A symbol to distinguish the legal entity for customers to identify

it.

– A trademark is typically a name, word, phrase, logo, symbol, design, image, or a combination of these elements.

– Aims to protect the customer from being misled as to the origin or quality of a product or service.

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To Summarize

• Beware: Benefits employees and entrepreneurs alike.

• It’s mine: It is important to protect your documentation, using copyrights and trademarks wherever required.

• Safeguard: Protecting your company’s intellectual property.

• Think like a lawyer: The need to think out-of-the-box to ensure the safety documents have no loopholes that the customer or competitor can use against you or your organization.

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Questions?

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Thank You