5 Ways to Spring Clean Your IP Portfolio

This April, Anaqua held its largest User Conference in company history. IP thought leaders from among the world’s most innovative corporations and law firms came together to share industry insights on how using the Anaqua product suite helps them accomplish a diverse range of business objectives. With approximately 250 attendees, the conference featured discussions on a range of critical innovation and IP issues, including patent strategy, partnering and collaboration, and trademark management.

The 2018 Anaqua User Conference demonstrated the powerful, emerging tools that are going to streamline portfolio management and improve the ability to monetize corporate portfolios. Therefore, common questions that were raised were: How can I better manage my IP portfolio? What are the best tools to use? How should I alter my strategy? The answers vary depending on who you may ask. At Anaqua, Vincent Brault, SVP of Product & Innovation recommends aligning your IP with your business strategy, developing a disciplined plan to remain competitive, and working smarter with prosecution analytics, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.

To get other insights, we asked industry leaders who attended our conference, to share quick tips on how they “Spring Clean” their IP portfolios. Here’s what they said:

1. Add Savings to Your Bottom Line by Using the Right Tools

“Existing tools such as AcclaimIP allow for identification and strategic disposal of marginal IP assets to lower maintenance fees, as well as identification of high-value assets for licensing or enforcement. Adding savings directly to the bottom line and creating new revenue streams whole-cloth are worthy achievements for virtually any portfolio manager or management group, and there is no time like the present to begin pursuing these ends.” -Bernard Tomsa, Attorney and Shareholder, Brooks Kushman P.C.

2. Dust off Your Data

“Take the dust from your data and clean it up.” -Sara Hanlon, Senior Patent Counsel, adidas

“Clean up your IP Actions.”- Tania Munguia, Paralegal, adidas

“Play to win!” – Christof Wolpert, Vice President of Global Legal Innovation, adidas

3. Use Tools to Your Advantage

“Use the Forward Rejection tool and use HyperView to organize our docket visually.”

4. Align Your IP Strategy with Business Goals

“We see many cases where a business plan evolved over time, and the IP strategy did not follow those changes.  We recommend constantly reviewing and updating the IP strategy to make sure it fully supports the underlying business goals for which it was created.”- Aaron Kamlay, Partner, Morris & Kamlay LLP.

5. Target Your Reporting

“Refresh and get targeted reporting generated through HyperView and automatically distributed to business executives.” -Jennifer Brumbaugh, Deputy Director of Intellectual Property, GKN plc.

To help corporations and law firms meet their business goals, Anaqua experts work closely with experts to help them put the best IP strategy plan in place to meet their business goals. It’s easy to say “align your IP with your business,” but to do this, you need to know a couple key pieces of information. First, you need to have a good understanding of your business objectives. Then, you need to understand what is in your portfolio, how your assets are performing, and the market landscape. With ANAQUA, you can quickly get a 360° view of your portfolio and, by leveraging AcclaimIP, you can understand how your IP fits into the larger market and competitive environment. Once you know, you can take the appropriate actions – prune/renew you portfolio, look for licensing opportunities, identify areas where you need additional coverage, take competitive action, understand litigation potential, and look for M&A prospects.