Posts Tagged: "strategy"

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.

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.

We must communicate effectively to be helpful. If the client isn’t listening because our delivery is ineffective or off-putting, it doesn’t matter that our legal opinion was brilliant because they will not be listening. Every interaction counts. Here are 13 tips to improve client communications.

Do you feel fatigued by the long hours, demanding clients and little sleep?   At points in our careers, many lawyers feel like they don’t have a life and that their work defines them.   This is understandable given the demands of the job and the high fees clients pay for legal services.   Yet, you must find ways to recharge and maintain your momentum for the work… Successful people stay focused and attack the challenge at hand, while enjoying family, friends and their surroundings. This is difficult to achieve if you are too tired and bored with your job. You can develop ways to supercharge your career and make certain that you are on the path to continued success and happiness for the long-term.

Giving a lawyer a critique of their work can be difficult. Yet, you cannot improve lawyer performance or achieve quality work product goals without providing feedback. In this article, I will share with you some of the things that I have learned about giving effective feedback in my years of managing lawyers with staff sizes ranging from 10 to over 2,000.

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.

LinkedIn was a rapidly growing company with only 22 patents in its portfolio in 2012, putting itself at high risk for patent assertion. With a revenue reaching nearly $1 billion and a growth of 86%, LinkedIn knew it had to develop a patent strategy to reduce its risk profile. So what was LinkedIn’s patent strategy and how did it increase its patent filings? Let’s start at the beginning… The opportunities for risk mitigation can be divided into two categories: increasing organic filings to address future assertion risk and patent acquisition to address present and near future risk.

Faced with ever-shrinking budgets and mounting pressure from the C-suite to demonstrate intellectual property (IP) value, many enterprises have jettisoned a once-prevailing global patent strategy: “File anywhere in the world where we or our competitors manufacture or sell products.” In view of the substantial costs of global patent protection, enterprises should pursue protection only when, and where, a value proposition can be rationally articulated. Thus, seven hallmarks of a rational global patent strategy are as follows…

While many, if not most, enterprises have instituted, and are executing, an IP strategy of some sort, an important question should be considered: Is the IP strategy optimal, such that its execution extracts maximum value from company technology? Some corporate IP strategies may seem sound in theory, but in practice they are (a) selectively or inconsistently applied within or across projects, (b) incompatible with how teams actually work, (c) relatively narrow in how they perceive innovation, and (d) distracting to innovators and IP practitioners while consuming enormous resources. Ultimately, the return on IP investment of such strategies may be questionable. However, enterprises that periodically take a step back to reflect on their current IP strategies, and recalibrate them if appropriate, are likely to derive the greatest possible value from IP.

CEOs, CFOs, CTOs and General Counsel are typically very good at making decisions when they have the relevant information, but how often do they have the relevant information when making decisions regarding patents and innovation? Even worse, when decisions are being made the Chief Patent Counsel is frequently not even in the room.

In a survey by IQPC (International Quality and Productivity Center) 52% of corporate respondents cited failure to align business strategy with IP coverage as one of the key risks to their company’s IP assets. It’s especially shocking when you know that the “top patents,” patents that are valuable because they have a commercial value (or will in the near future) are limited to 15% of a company’s patent portfolio.

The very nature of preparing a patent strategy is something that requires both understanding of the patent laws and a healthy understanding of the business realities of evolving technologies. In order to plot a course calculated to succeed company leaders need to be cognizant of the actual business realities facing the company, not the talking points of lobbyists or those who write SEC filings or those who get paid to write press releases. Indeed, a comprehensive understanding of your own research and development, as well as where the industry is heading, is crucial when attempting to create the patent strategy that has any chance of succeeding.