The management of intellectual property has become a critical competitive arena in global commerce. Without thoughtful planning and a useful knowledge base to support the making of informed decisions, enterprises often spend too much and receive too little for their intellectual property investment.

For example, many businesses fail to apply the same amount or quality of rigor and thought to the building, maintenance, and leveraging of their patent portfolios as they usually apply to other decision making processes. Perhaps even worse, a company's patenting activity may proceed unguided by the overall goals and plans of the business. Resources are expended, time is spent, and file cabinets are filled, but little happens of genuine support or consequence with respect to the trajectory of the business.

Fitch, Even, Tabin & Flannery® can assist the enterprise who seeks to do better. We have the skills and experience required to acquire intellectual property rights and to leverage those rights in the marketplace and courts. But we also have the skills and experience to help a business make better, more informed decisions regarding what to protect, how to protect it, and when and for how long to protect it.

Our approach is built upon four basic tenants:

Knowing what one has should usually entail more than simply knowing how many patents, registered trademarks, copyright registrations one has. Depending upon the intellectual property right in question, there are a considerable number of useful data items that can and should be understood regarding a given portfolio in general and the individual properties contained in the portfolio. Some of these data items are relatively objective and can be garnered in a relatively straightforward manner. Other items can reflect more subjective characterizing information.

Fitch Even can assist with either or both. Some of the services that we provide in this area include:

Fitch Even assists clients to properly frame their intellectual property needs in context with the business practices and strategies that drive their enterprise or industry. Technology and business models are a particularly powerful tool that we employ to facilitate the consolidation of a relevant business or industry view into an effective decision-making instrument. These models leverage the business plans, industry intelligence, technology roadmaps, and strategic planning of a given enterprise into a cohesive knowledge management tool that can readily communicate the intellectual property needs of a business at all levels of the enterprise.

Fitch Even can also assist at various levels to help an enterprise acquire required intellectual property assets. In addition to providing the core services to acquire protection for inventions, we can also assist with the invention identification process itself. We can also help to identify opportunities to acquire needed assets through licensing, acquisition, joint business ventures or other business arrangements.

We serve the needs of businesses of every size and have worked with intellectual property portfolios of every size and scope. We have successfully assisted many of our long term clients with their portfolio management issues for decades.

Fitch Even has a long-standing participative relationship with The Knowledge and Intellectual Property Management Taskforce (http://www.km-iptask.org), a research, development, and deployment consortium comprised of over 20 companies. The objectives of the members are to improve cash flows, earnings, and market cap through intellectual capital management practices, and help define the role and business implications for managing intellectual capital in national and global economies.

Fitch Even has the experience, the skill, and the enthusiasm to help you with your portfolio management needs.