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Stewart Vandermark of East Midlands’ law firm Nelsons dicusses how lessons learnt from BBC1 series The Apprentice can be applied to everyday business life.

As another series of The Apprentice comes to an end, we reflect on the boardroom battles, the players’ successes and failures, and whether the right candidate gets hired.

But, in our reflections can we really draw any comparisons with real business? Are there any lessons to be learned from the erroneous strategies of the losing teams?

In a format changed this year to showcase entrepreneurial spirit, Lord Sugar has said that "those who are really successful start from a small business and build themselves up to something bigger".

Businesses all start with an idea. In The Apprentice, we see a team contribute to find the inspiration for a viable business and then work together to develop it, brand it and take it to market. When the idea goes badly wrong, suddenly everyone looks to duck responsibility.

But when it goes well, everyone tries to take the credit. For viewers, the boardroom battles are all part and parcel of the attraction of this avidly watched TV show, yet so often in business the same applies.

A business idea is conceived, someone else bought on board to help develop it, the idea is developed and then branded before going to market. But just as it starts to take off, we commonly see business partners fall out. Whether it’s due to personal differences, different business ideas or a sense that not everyone is contributing fairly, the problems remain the same.

Arguments begin over who did what, who developed which idea or concept and who owns which rights to allow them to take the idea forward. If no thought is given to this at the outset of the arrangement and if the respective rights of the parties are not clearly documented in advance, so it is set out who owns what if the parties separate, these can be difficult and time consuming questions to unravel.

The first step is always to identify what rights exist. Frequently, it is ownership of the intellectual property rights that controls the marketing of the product. So it is crucial to establish who owns those rights. Where there are registered rights, there is at least a start point. For unregistered rights, it may not even be clear what rights subsist.

Once the rights are identified, then it be can be analysed who owns those rights, whether one or other of the parties, or if jointly owned. Where parties own the rights jointly, different rules apply to registered rights such as patents as to what each party can do without the agreement of the other from unregistered rights, such as copyright.

It may also be different if, for example, the parties trade as a partnership as opposed to trading through a limited company. If a limited company, it is generally presumed that the individuals hold any rights developed for the company to exploit on trust for the company.

Time and again, we see the parties fall out after what may be years of development just as sales start to roll-in. So the question of who can continue to market the product becomes a question of significant commercial importance. It is a question that is often difficult to answer.

At least on The Apprentice everything is filmed. Part of the entertainment factor of the show is that we see a party claim all the credit whilst the footage shows otherwise. In real life, the cameras aren’t rolling, so it is all the more vital that parties caught up in the excitement of embarking upon a new project spend some time applying their minds to who owns what and what each can do with the ideas if it all falls apart. Otherwise, they may all end up with nothing.

Stewart Vandermark is a director and a specialist in intellectual property disputes at Midlands law firm Nelsons.