Intellectual Property Solutions

What to do with Intellectual Property Rights

Intellectual property rights can be used to meet many different business objectives.  Most people recognize that they can use intellectual property rights to stop direct competitors from taking their inventions, business information, and business identity.

But, intellectual property rights can also be used for many other purposes. Each purpose may lead to a different strategy for protecting your intellectual property. 

Just getting patents on what you invent probably won’t get you the business success you want. Decisions on which inventions to patent, where to patent (which countries), how much to spend on getting (and maintaining) those patents, what instructions to give to your patent attorneys and agents, determine whether your patents will help you meet your business goals.

Getting the “wrong” patents, spending too much (or too little) time on getting patents undermines your goals by wasting money - money that could otherwise be spent getting the “right” patents.

Getting the “right” patents requires knowing why you are getting the patent. How (and with whom) do you intend to use it? Is that use realistic? What are the risks of that use? [You did know that there are many ways to use patents other than suing a competitor to stop the competitor from making or selling a product similar to yours, didn’t you?]

What I Can Do for You

I will work with company personnel to identify and articulate the company’s intellectual property strategy. An identified and articulated  intellectual property strategy can be communicated to the persons or committees who decide what inventions to patent, to the patent attorneys and agents who file and prosecute your patent applications. Those people then are in a better position to get the “right” patents, to spend the right amount of time getting those patents, and to get those patents on a schedule that furthers the company’s business goals.

I will bring my experience managing high volume patent processes to help your company design or improve processes to ensure that inventions move efficiently from idea to patent review to patent application to patent grant, all so that everyone in the process is working consistently toward the company’s stated intellectual property strategy.  

Who Should Hire Me

Organizations that have at least some experience with intellectual property, including patents and want:

- to understand why they are protecting particular intellectual property; or

- to improve the effectiveness of their intellectual property; or

- to improve the effectiveness of their patent attorneys and agents; or

- to improve the efficiency of their intellectual property budget; or

- to reduce spending on intellectual property without compromising the business effectiveness of their intellectual property; or

1. -to improve the efficiency of the processes for managing their intellectual property; or
   

2. -to bring together disparate intellectual property goals and processes from different parts of the organization.
   

I do not want to replace your existing intellectual property lawyers. I want to help you make the best and most efficient use of them. That will also enable them to better serve you so that you have an even better relationship with your existing lawyers.