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New Year’s Resolutions: Top 5 Consequential Changes in the 2018 NDAA

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The National Defense Authorization Act (“NDAA”) for Fiscal Year 2018 was signed into law on December 12, 2017, and authorizes a topline national defense budget of $700 billion. While the 2018 NDAA makes a number of changes to Department of Defense (“DOD”) policy and programs, in this article we explain five major changes to acquisition policy and how they will impact the way companies do business with DOD.

1. IP Rights Acquisition and Licensing. A number of important changes to DOD acquisition of intellectual property (“IP”) rights will take effect in 2018.

First, section 835 requires DOD to identify the technical data to be delivered under an engineering and manufacturing development of a major weapons system contract, and negotiate a price for that data up front. Congress hopes that with this change, agencies won’t have to negotiate prices during performance, and that they won’t seek rights to more extensive data than is necessary.

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