IP Portfolio Management
Fitch, Even, Tabin & Flannery LLP helps many businesses apply the same rigor and quality of thought to the building, maintenance, and leveraging of their patent portfolios as they usually apply to other decision-making processes. Our goal is to integrate patenting activity with the overall goals and plans of the business. We have the skills and experience necessary to acquire intellectual property rights and to leverage those rights in the marketplace and courts. But we also understand how to help a business make better, more-informed decisions regarding what to protect, how to protect it, and when and where to seek protection.
In undertaking a portfolio assessment, our lawyers review both the technology spaces in which a client operates and the market opportunities that the client seeks to pursue. Beyond patent prosecution we can identify a variety of tactics to accomplish a portfolio’s expansion, including through a licensing agreement or an acquisition. Similarly, we can leverage a client’s portfolio to monetize their existing patents by selling or licensing the rights to them. No matter which strategy we pursue, it is always with business objectives at the forefront.
Our business-focused intellectual property portfolio management rests on these tenets:
- Know What You Have. This is far more than doing an inventory of a business’s patents, trademarks, and copyright registrations. Fitch Even lawyers provide understandable, meaningful portfolio reviews. We identify and assemble the specific intellectual property assets of a given enterprise, then work with our clients to efficiently drive an information-based IP acquisition and maintenance program.
- Know What You Need. We help clients to coordinate business plans, industry intelligence, technology road maps, and strategic planning and to develop cohesive knowledge management tools that can readily communicate the intellectual property needs of a business at all levels of the enterprise.
- Acquire What You Need. In addition to providing the core services to acquire protection for inventions, we can also help to identify opportunities to acquire needed assets through licensing, acquisition, joint business ventures, or other business arrangements.
This last tenet reflects an increasingly important aspect of portfolio management related to the patents held by non-practicing entities (NPEs). Fitch Even has a sophisticated understanding of the portfolio objectives for all patent holders including NPEs, having represented them in both patenting activities and in infringement litigation. We are often able to resolve infringement controversies by helping to orchestrate the sale of entire portfolios or the licensing of specific patents in a portfolio, to help the parties monetize their patent rights while avoiding the cost of a trial. This ultimately creates more meaningful market opportunities that encourage innovation.
Fitch Even’s integrated portfolio management approach has helped a number of clients maintain vigorous portfolio development strategies. And we constantly seek to identify new techniques and innovative approaches, including through our long-standing relationship with the Knowledge and Intellectual Property Management Taskforce, a research, development, and deployment consortium dedicated to strategic and financial success through effective intellectual capital management practices. Fitch Even lawyers are committed to advancing the critical thinking and innovated planning essential in today’s global economy to become trusted advisors to our clients.
