28 April 2016, 4 pm
Now I am at a joint CIPA/LES seminar. The LES is the Licensing Executives Society, and it contains people who are less interested in the IP procurement process than in using the IP once procured. If this strikes you as a strange way of prioritising, you are in absolutely the right profession (ie you are a patent attorney) but you may be out of a job within the next decade. Just saying. The theme of the seminar is how to build an IP portfolio and strategy for a small business. There are some really good talks. Most of them can be summed up as: if you are going to build an IP portfolio, do it properly. For example:
You can get Competitive Intelligence, says one of the speakers, using IP Analytics. Think IP data, double the complexity and then turn it into a picture. This is a neat way of showing you just how bad your IP portfolio is compared to other people’s, just how close you are to being bitten on the backside, and how big a gulf there is between your IP strategy and the things that really matter. Only in this way can you become Competitively Intelligent. If miserable. Ah yes, but, says another speaker, what exactly is strategy? There is a nervous silence. You cannot just go around asking difficult questions like this, undermining the very architecture of our existence. This speaker goes on to make further provocative comments about the amount of jargon patent attorneys use when talking to business clients. He says there is no point telling a COO that you have an Added Subject Matter Problem, or an Article 54(3) Citation, or an Ex Post Facto Analysis; they are likely to ask you to go home until you’re not contagious any more. This is jargon, he says, and jargon is bad. To illustrate this more clearly, he asks if anyone in the room knows what a Chinese Wax Job is. This yields another nervous silence. A Chinese Wax Job sounds like something else you wouldn’t want to tell a COO you suffered from. But luckily, it is to do with surfing. So that’s alright. If your clients are into surfing. If they’re not, you must refrain from talking to them about both Added Subject Matter and Chinese Wax Jobs. The second half of the seminar, ie post-Red Bull®, is chaired by Yours Truly. I try to chair it fiercely, but the fact is that no one – either on the panel or in the audience – is willing to take me seriously. This is because one of the earlier speakers told us that if you want to grow a thriving business around a good piece of technology, you absolutely have to go to a decent patent attorney, and that decent patent attorneys work in large, established, high-class patent attorney firms, for example in London, or in London, and definitely not in some small, tin-pot practice in some backwater like, say, Exeter. He did not specifically say Do not touch with a barge-pole somebody who claims to be a patent attorney but actually lives in Zummerzet, because if Exeter is a backwater it is nothing to the back-backwaters that surround it. But the implication was there. To be honest, with less than two weeks to go until I can stop pretending to be up to the job of CIPA President, I care little for whether a roomful of IP professionals is prepared to take me seriously. I’m just glad they’re not throwing things at me.
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