Stephen Glazier

Many a Chief IP Counsel (“CIPC”) annually determine, at the end of the fourth quarter or the beginning of the first quarter, patent application filing targets for their enterprise. This exercise is most usually dictated by a C-suite executive (e.g., GC, CFO, CTO, COO, or CEO) in order to allocate an IP budget. After all, the commonly-held belief in the corporate world is that if you do not set a budget, every dollar spent is over budget. Right!? Thus, we ask: “Should we be setting annual (‘hard’ or ‘soft’) filing targets in the first place and, if so, how do we go about setting them?” The answer to the above questions no doubt varies among enterprises of varying number of employees, revenue, industry, and corporate culture. Those CIPC who are forced, or otherwise feel compelled, to set a patent application filing target must inform their C-suite of an exact number. The calculus of that number is essentially determining how many patent applications should their enterprise be filing of the 2.9 million patent applications filed globally (including the 1.1M filed in China and the 589K filed in the United States last year). Well, there is no doubt that such calculus may not only be more art than science, but may very well be placing the cart before the horse (i.e., predicating an enterprise’s level of innovation on what may be an arbitrary, legal department created fiction).