Posts Tagged: "patent strategy"

Without unlimited funds, a constant issue for developing and maintaining a patent portfolio is how to balance between obtaining the highest quality patents and obtaining patents at a lower cost to grow a portfolio. When biasing towards a reduced cost, some aspects of a well-written patent application may also be sacrificed. Some of these items may be more critical to a patent that is likely to be enforced, whereas other items may be more valuable to building a robust patent family based on that disclosure. In any event, there is always an opportunity to pursue a patent with a strategic focus. The below non-exhaustive list includes some common items that may be included in a more comprehensive patent application preparation and prosecution process that aims for higher quality and other items that may be sacrificed in a more cost-sensitive patent application process. Of course, the approach here does not recommend removing or foregoing any items from the patent application process, but these items are available for consideration when there are budgetary constraints.

A company’s knowledge of IP trends and its own internal IP strategy is crucial to a wide range of issues the company may face—including litigation, business expansion, and retaining its talent. Being prepared for IP issues your company may face externally, as well as developing a strategic plan internally for your company’s IP portfolio, will better position your organization on multiple fronts. Below are 10 reasons your company should pay attention to these IP trends.

Successful patent strategies for business are inexorably tied to the quality of the patents upon which the patent strategies depend. The quality of a patent depends upon the capacity of a patent prosecutor to resolve a series of non-trivial patent application drafting and/or examination challenges in order to secure the issuance of a valid patent that includes claims that provide a desired scope of protection. Such challenges can involve subjecting complex and/or unwieldy subject matter to patent form in a manner that yields an accurate, clear and complete detailed description of the invention and well-crafted claims. Moreover, they can involve managing difficult patent examiners who require the amendment of claims as a prerequisite to advancing the prosecution of the application. The detailed description and the claims are the parts of the patent that can be employed by the practitioner to imbue a patent with attributes that optimize their support of patent strategies for business.

Join Gene Quinn on Thursday, September 27, 2018, for a free webinar discussion on the important topic of streamlining the patent prosecution process and stretching a patent budget efficiently. Joining Gene will be Stuart Recher, Vice President of IP Services for Clarivate Analytics.

A decent patent strategy starts with protecting your current commercial product.  A better patent strategy builds on this by not only considering what is, but what could be.  To provide real value, consider the actions of others and invest time studying the patent landscape and gathering business intelligence from competitors’ filings.  Additionally, instead of passively observing such filings, a company should also consider being more active by filing one or more third-party submissions (often termed preissuance submissions) in their competitor’s pending applications.  These third-party submissions are a terrific defensive tool to slow down or impede your competitors’ patent ambitions.

Gene Quinn, has been named to the 2018 IAM Strategy 300, which recognizes The World’s Leading IP Strategists. This marks the second consecutive year Gene has been recognized by IAM as one of the top IP strategists in the world.

10,000+ patents, spending $10M’s per year, cross-licenses, and license potential with dozens of companies, what’s the value of the portfolio to the business? Is your patent strategy valuable to your company? How? OK, tag you are it, what is the answer? The problem seems intractable. In previous articles, we have discussed how to determine your general patent risk and how to put a number on it. But where do you start when you are trying to estimate the value of your patent strategy?

Join Gene Quinn, patent attorney and publisher of IPWatchdog.com, on Thursday, February 8, 2018, at 12pm ET, for a discussion on patent prosecution strategy. Joining Gene will be Russ Slifer, former Deputy Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and current partner with Schwegman Lundberg & Woessner, and Bernie Tomsa, a patent attorney and shareholder with Brooks Kushman.

When managing many of cross-licensing negotiations it can be hard to prioritize your activities. In a recent case, the client experienced this very thing and felt they would benefit from a clear overview of their efforts… Determining the risk potential from a given licensor required us to look at several variables. Steps 1-4 of Figure 2 focus on assessing the strength of the infringement case presented by the opposing company. Finally, in step 5, we estimate the impact of that case on our client’s revenues based on the number of evidence of use (EOU) materials still in the case. Based on these assumptions, we calculate the total potential risk to our client.

Eventually Congress will recognize that all the changes enacted to address the overblown patent troll issue has resulted in far more damage to U.S. competitiveness. This revelation, unfortunately, will take time as the old patent troll narrative is still being cited on the Hill. In the interim, inventors and U.S. companies need to re-evaluate their IP protection strategy… Too often the reaction to losing portfolio value is to decrease investment in the portfolio. That is the wrong approach. More effort and investment need to be made to identify key assets, perform thorough prior art searches and draft applications/claims that can withstand an IPR petition. Keep a patent application family alive with very diverse claim strategies for these key assets.

IPWatchdog is pleased to announce that IPWatchdog Founder, Gene Quinn, has been named to the 2017 IAM Strategy 300, which recognizes The World’s Leading IP Strategists. The award honors industry professionals who are changing the ways in which intellectual property is protected and managed, raising the bar on the practice of patent, trade secret, trademark and copyright law, and leading innovation in the field. The minimum requirement for inclusion in the guide is three nominations from outside the individual’s own organization, with nominees being thoroughly reviewed and vetted by an IAM committee.

“It’s not very helpful to talk about quality,” said former Chief Judge Michel. We agree. Quality has too many meanings for too many people. We all want quality patents, but we do not agree on what quality means. A better objective for patent strategy and patent management is the pursuit of valuable patents. “But wait!” you say, “Isn’t ‘valuable’ just…

When the corporate asserter arrived at our client’s door, the asserter wanted: (1) to obtain both a cross-license and revenue from a patent license and (2) to increase our client’s purchases of the asserter’s products. Our client had virtually no patents of its own. To shift the negotiation, the decision was made to purchase defensive patents (counter-assertion patents). The reasons were that invalidating the asserter’s 10,000+ patents would be expensive and would take too long. Also, putting revenue from the asserter’s products and services at risk would change the dynamic of the negotiations to our client’s benefit.