Glossary
IP Assignment
A legal clause ensuring that work products created by a hire — code, designs, content — are owned by your company, not the individual or a third party.
IP (intellectual property) assignment is the contractual mechanism that makes sure everything your team creates — code, designs, documentation — is legally owned by your company. Without it, ownership can be ambiguous or default to the creator.
For remote and offshore hiring, clean IP assignment is essential and non-trivial, because it has to hold up under the laws of the country where the person is employed. A proper managed-team or EOR arrangement builds enforceable IP assignment and NDAs into every contract.
If you are hiring across borders, confirm that IP assignment is airtight before anyone touches your codebase — retrofitting it later is painful.