Intellectual property is of increasing importance to technology companies, and fortunately a wider array of services are now available for monetizing, insuring, analyzing, and managing IP assets. Intellectual property represents a key strategic asset for most technology companies – but few take advantage of these services to manage their IP effectively. AiPi provides IP analysis and management for a wide range of business cases – here are some success stories.
- IP Litigation Finance
- IP Asset Management
- Protecting Commercialized Products and Services
- Patent Valuation and Enforcement
IP Litigation Finance
Technology companies routinely create patent portfolios to protect their commercial products and developed technology. However, the high costs of patent litigation often creates an impediment to enforcement, allowing the technology company’s developed technology to be hijacked by competitors.
AiPi Litigation Finance enables enforcement by providing nonrecourse financing for patent infringement litigations in the US and overseas, covering all costs and services related to each financed litigation in return for a share of the settlement or award. AiPi Litigation Finance focuses exclusively on financing patent infringement cases, and invests only in meritorious claims brought by patent owners who face a threat to their business due to the infringing activities of others.
IP Asset Management
A wide range of companies – from start-ups to Fortune 100 technology companies – typically struggle to effectively manage their IP assets. Most companies are unable to identify their own patents that: 1) protect current products and thereby merit on-going payment of fees to avoid abandonment; 2) provide value by protecting future products or otherwise by being infringed by competitors; or 3) fail to cover current/future commercialized products and that therefore have little or no value.
AiPi routinely places patents in the relevant categories, so that technology companies: 1) only pay annuities on worthwhile patents – allowing worthless patents to become abandoned, and 2) are empowered to engage in licensing campaigns or litigation to monetize infringed patents.
Protecting Commercialized Products and Services
Technology companies typically employ Product/Service and R&D teams to focus on developing and maintaining products/services. However, attention is often not paid to sufficiently protecting the commercialized products/services, and intellectual property is relegated to being an afterthought. For example, technology companies routinely rely on a single, narrowly tailored patent to protect a commercialized technology, thereby enabling competitors to easily design around and effectively hijack the developed technology.
AiPi’s patent landscapes and predictive analytics reveal key insights about relevant developments being patented by competitors, universities, and others. AiPi is able to use these insights to build more robust patent portfolios that leverage an unprecedented understanding of the state of the art – including competitors’ R&D efforts. The robust portfolios that AiPi creates increase our clients’ valuations, such as in the context of mergers and acquisitions, identify acquisition targets, and enhance efforts to obtain investments.
Patent Valuation and Enforcement
AiPi is frequently asked to examine large (and sometimes small) patent portfolios to determine the value of individual patents or entire portfolios, such as in the contexts of patent sale; company merger/acquisition; insurance brokers attempting to insure patents; and banks/creditors using patents as collateral in making loans. This type of valuation can create liquidity using the patents, and also decrease the ‘carry cost’ of patents, such as by enabling sale or abandonment of patents that no longer have value to the client. AiPi has developed an industry recognized method of patent valuation based on a number of commercially recognized indicators to achieve these goals.
AiPi also routinely reviews small and large patent portfolios for the purpose of identifying infringers, and this patent policing can be provided on a one-off or ongoing basis – such as quarterly, semi-annually, etc. AiPi is then able to perform due diligence on the identified controversy to rate the merits of a potential patent infringement licensing campaign or lawsuit, such as in the context of litigation financing.