Karl Maersch

Karl Maersch is a former patent attorney and heads the Patent Advisory & Monetization practice at Hilco Global. His team helps companies make strategic decisions about their IP portfolios including strategic generation, right-sizing vs revenue, benchmarking against competitors, patent valuation, and identifying opportunities to generate revenue.

His team also runs processes and finds partners to help companies realize revenue including patent and brand licensing, litigation finance/contingent fee placement, IP- backed lending, and patent sales.

Prior to joining Hilco, Karl was the CEO of West Four IP, an intellectual property consulting firm that provided strategy advice and monetization services. In the time Karl operated West Four IP, the firm’s clients realized over $550M in revenue from IP.

Prior to West Four, Karl was Deputy General Counsel at Allied Security Trust an entity that evaluates patents and funds joint purchases of portfolios. At AST, Karl headed intellectual property transactions and portfolio development.

For a number of years, Karl was the head of IP litigation worldwide for Dow Chemical where he instituted a process to review the company’s patent portfolio and identify monetizable assets. While at Dow, he filed the company’s first-ever ITC complaint, which resulted in a 25-year exclusion order, believed to be the longest exclusion order in the history of the ITC. He also filed a patent infringement case in Canada, which resulted in the largest patent damages award in Canadian history. Karl also co-lead a successful trade secret misappropriation case in China against a Chinese company.

Prior to joining Dow, Karl was Associate General Counsel of Eastman Kodak where he managed a team of attorneys, technologists, and licensing executives that supported the company’s intellectual property functions, including patent licensing, patent sales, patent litigation, patent-based M&A, and brand licensing. Karl also managed the IP aspects of Kodak’s bankruptcy. During his time at Kodak, his team generated over $3.0B in revenue from IP.

Karl started his career at Jones Day where he litigated intellectual property disputes in U.S. District Court, at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the ITC, and in various courts in Europe and Asia. Karl has an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University and a JD from the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law. He is based in Chagrin Falls, Ohio and in his spare time he fulfills Venmo requests from his 5 daughters.