Pierre Keeley Image

Pierre Keeley

is the Director of Patents at LinkedIn, where he was hired as the company’s first registered patent attorney in 2012. Prior to LinkedIn, he served as Riverbed Technology’s sole in-house patent attorney, and was in private practice at the law firm of Fenwick & West.

Recent Articles by Pierre Keeley

Ensuring a robust defensive portfolio: A Prepared Counter-Assertion Strategy

The required number of patents in a given playbook varies based on both the size of company of concern and our exposure to it. The general goal of a playbook is to shift the licensing amount purportedly owed by LinkedIn by $20 million to $200 million in our favor. In order to achieve this, we have found that a good playbook should contain between three and 10 patent families, with evidence of use for key patents. The goal of each playbook is to show infringement by the asserter’s products and services exceeding $1 billion revenue. We set specific goals for each one and tested its contents against them.

Assertion Risk Mitigation Opportunity Through Patent Acquisition

In this post, we’ll analyze LinkedIn’s patent acquisition process and the results of its targeted buying program. While the increase in LinkedIn’s filings helped to grow the total patent portfolio, challenges remain. First, while organic filings tend to focus on LinkedIn’s core technology and therefore help a great deal with counter-assertion against potential competitors, they are less helpful when it comes to large corporate asserters further outside LinkedIn’s core technology area. Second, the priority dates on all the new filings are recent (after 2011). Earlier priority dates (old inventions) help the most in counter-assertion, but LinkedIn would have had to file for those patents in the 2000s. Fortunately, the market for buying and selling patents is robust and allows companies to fill in where they have weakness in their portfolios. Focused patent buying allowed us to build a counter-assertion portfolio to help bolster any negotiations.