Kevin McLintock serves as the Associate General Counsel – Head of WW Intellectual Property Strategy, Patents and Trademarks at Logitech.
Kevin is a patent attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area with many years of experience leading in-house IP teams. He is focused on establishing strategic IP foundations that enable businesses to lead in their technical fields while creating room for lateral growth and new opportunities. To Kevin, this means partnering closely with engineering teams to understand the nuances of what makes their innovations truly great, engaging with business leaders to align the IP tools in his toolbox with where the business is going, and looking for creative ways to overcome IP obstacles that would otherwise have the potential to slow the business down.
He has led the IP function at early-stage startups and multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies. Kevin’s experience includes patents, trademarks, copyrights, open-source software, cyber security, dispute resolution, ITC matters, litigation, enforcement, M&A, and joint ventures.
Kevin stays engaged with broad cross-sections of evolving technologies and is currently focused on finding ways for companies to more freely collaborate and share IP related to environmental sustainability.
Innovation, whether in the technical or biological fields, occurs at a pace today that likely exceeds any period in history. This is due in part to the modern tools available that promote innovation. Equipment that was once available only to universities or billion dollar corporations, now sits on the desks of small startup companies and hobbyists. Consider: only a few years ago it cost tens of thousands of dollars and took months of work to produce a medical prosthetic limb. Today, researchers are using consumer grade 3D printers to create replacement jaw-bones in a matter of weeks. In an environment of such rapid innovation, it is no wonder that some question whether patents are still valuable or relevant given the slow, bureaucratic and expensive process require to obtain them.