Posts in Business

“Should we insource IP work?” This perennial question is posed by in-house professionals and organizational leaders in corporations, universities, and other institutions—and dreaded by outside IP counsel, who fear loss of insourced client business. Deceptively binary and straightforward, the insourcing question often can’t be answered without in-house teams first exploring a host of underlying considerations. Their decision-making calculus may confront grey areas and vexing tradeoffs, ultimately coming down to rough cost-benefit analyses and gut instincts.

Artificial intelligence has moved beyond the experimental phase in legal practice. The legal industry is no longer debating whether lawyers can or should use AI tools, or whether AI will affect the economics of law firm and in-house legal department operations. Those questions have been answered. AI is already reshaping how legal work is performed, how legal departments manage demand, how law firms are expected to price services, how patent teams analyze portfolios, and how clients evaluate outside counsel.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving faster than traditional intellectual property (IP) strategy was designed to handle. The issue is not simply speed, although speed is certainly part of the problem. The deeper challenge is that AI innovation does not fit neatly into the legacy IP operating model. The assets, development cycles, regulatory environment, and commercial pathways are all different. And the value drivers are increasingly distributed across a spectrum of AI-related intangible domains, which include patents, trade secrets, data rights, software architecture, licensing models, and customer contracts.

A recent U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision applying California trade secret law offers a timely reminder that published patent materials cannot easily be recast as trade secrets. In International Medical Devices, Inc. v. Cornell, the Federal Circuit reversed trade-secret liability and vacated related damages and injunctive relief after concluding that the plaintiffs had not shown protectable trade secrets under the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I have a candid conversation with Melissa Silverstein about both IP strategy and the human side of IP, including a discussion of the struggles that some attorneys have with substance abuse. The first half of the conversation centers on a clear market correction in intellectual property strategy: portfolios are being forced to operate like business assets rather than legal inventory…. The conversation then pivots sharply to the human dimension of the profession, where Silverstein’s current work is focused. Drawing on her own experience, she addresses the prevalence of substance abuse, burnout, and mental health challenges among high-performing attorneys.

Today, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) published a study exploring challenges faced by EU small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in obtaining financing by offering intellectual property (IP) as collateral. Set against the backdrop of the EU’s recently launched Savings and Investment Union (SIU) program, the EUIPO’s study identifies several structural barriers preventing SMEs from obtaining IP-backed financing and concludes with a series of policy recommendations designed to address the SME credit gap and unlock tremendous economic value for the wider EU market.

IPWatchdog is happy to announce several leadership promotions to support its continued growth and strategic expansion. Renée C. Quinn has been named President, Katarzyna Kryca has been promoted to Senior Vice President, and Morgan Connell has been promoted to Director of Programs and Strategic Partnerships. Founder Gene Quinn will continue to serve as Chief Executive Officer.

For decades, management scholars and practitioners have grappled with what I call the “knowledge problem” in organizations—the stubborn difficulty of codifying and transferring expertise that resides in individual employees’ heads and habits. The most valuable organizational knowledge has always been tacit: the judgment calls, the contextual adaptations, the intuitive “feel” for how things get done. This knowledge walked out the door every evening and, more problematically, departed permanently when employees moved to competitors.

I have spent most of my professional career talking to patent practitioners about AI. For years, the conversation was about whether AI could be trusted, whether it was ready, and whether it would actually change how patent work gets done. I have watched the profession move from skepticism to curiosity to cautious adoption to – in 2026, for the first time – something that feels like acceptance. Questions that once provoked heated debate at conferences now feel almost trite. Nobody is really questioning whether AI has a place in patent practice anymore. The question that has replaced it is harder and more consequential:

If 2025 was the year every IP practice rushed to adopt AI, 2026 is the year the bill comes due — and a striking number of organizations are discovering they have no reliable way to read it. That was the organizing message from IPWatchdog LIVE 2026’s session: The Business Impact of AI in Practice: Calculating ROI in the AI Era.

The strength of many of today’s most valuable companies is based significantly on intangible assets, like trademarks, patents, trade secrets and brand reputation. Hard-assets or “tangibles,” like real estate and equipment, are a relative blip on many large businesses value radar. What is surprising is the extent to which these companies are dominated by intangible assets and what that means for how they are understood and financed.

A panel on day three of IPWatchdog LIVE 2026 offered the IP community a candid look at how large operating companies actually evaluate and respond to patent assertions. The answers carry direct implications for every practitioner advising clients on the sell side of a transaction. The session, titled The Big Tech View on Patents and the Patent Market, featured Russell Binns (Allied Security Trust (AST)), Ola Adekunle (Google), Caroline Pinkston (Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)), and Dean Geibel (Samtec).

A panel on day one of IPWatchdog LIVE 2026 didn’t mince words: the voluntary patent licensing ecosystem is functionally broken, and the IP community needs to understand why. That was the diagnostic consensus from the panel titled Patent Dealmaking, Monetization & Licensing: An Examination of Capital, Risk, and Deal Flow, moderated by Brian O’Shaughnessy (Dinsmore & Shohl) and featuring Michael Gulliford (Soryn IP Capital), Louis Carbonneau (Tangible IP), and Dan Kesack (WTW Insurance).

As artificial intelligence adoption accelerates across both commercial and government sectors, traditional contracting frameworks are being stretched beyond their limits. That tension was the focus of a panel at IPWatchdog Live 2026 today, featuring Judge Ryan T. Holte of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims; Stephanie Curcio, co-founder and CEO of NLPatent; and TJ Whittle, Legal Counsel at Anduril Industries.