Know the Patent Landscape and Create Opportunities
We develop solid strategies for protecting your ideas and provide guidance for companies considering their intellectual property options. By understanding our clients’ business, we develop intellectual property programs that promote business objectives. We can assess our clients’ existing patent portfolios to ensure that our clients’ patents cover their current products and services. We also help identify technologies that are not yet covered by patents and may present new opportunities for our clients to stake a claim.
Portfolio mapping helps our clients maximize the value of their intellectual property assets. This analysis involves assessing our clients’ portfolio and that of our clients’ competitors. Portfolio mapping reveals our clients’ positions in the market and helps them identify blocking patents early on, before they become more problematic. It can be used to develop optimized strategies which may include a design around, non-infringement opinion, or license.
Due Diligence and Risk Assessment
We also assist in preparing venture capital, investor, and acquisition due diligence. As technology companies are acquired at increasing premiums, and as more technology companies enter the market, an accurate and complete picture of intellectual property assets becomes even more critical. We take a comprehensive approach to due diligence, considering potential outcomes of litigation, the value of intellectual property rights, and the transferability of intellectual property agreements.
Our expertise in science, technology and the law allows us to chart the best course to protect and value IP assets. In doing so, we provide actionable advice in adversarial situations and help accomplish the best outcomes for our clients. Whether you are a buyer or a target business, we act quickly as new issues arise during a transaction and answer investors’ questions. We identify key issues, propose options for mitigating risks, and strengthen our clients’ bargaining positions.
Invest in the Right Places
Because business moves much faster than the time it takes the PTO to issue a patent, it may be advisable to perform a patentability analysis before investing in a patent application. A patentability analysis involves searching the relevant prior art for pre-existing disclosures that could materially impact the scope of patent coverage available. Information about existing prior art can be used to help design a patent prosecution strategy that focuses on areas more likely to result in patentable subject matter and avoids areas that are unlikely to be patentable.
