Hi Will,
The pure evaluation of IP is generally an exercise in accounting. Of course, how does one evaluate legal things without knowing something of the law? Intellectual asset accounting has been around for a while. Reporting of publicly traded companies generally requires that in some form or another. I don't read business-speak, so I can't really tell if those positions are different in any way from the traditional intellectual asset management.
I don't know much about accounting, so I can't say how exciting those jobs have been to date. I'm just noting which way the wind seems to be blowing. I see people forming groups to go buy neglected IP from companies and then either flipping them (immediately re-selling for a profit) or enforcing them in court. That arbitrage seems to indicate a newly realized value of IP in the next couple years as companies slowly wake up and see what's happening to their IP that they're selling cheap.
Would a lawyer do this work? Maybe. Accountants and lawyers frequently work together on requisite reporting for publicly traded companies. Privately held companies generally don't need to report on their assets and can completely ignore the value of their IP (and they frequently do just that). The attorneys that do this work are generally not IP attorneys. They're generally tax and corporate attorneys.
Here's a quick break down as to how it works: the IP attorney (me, for example) creates the property from the idea and just makes the property as valuable as possible by making it cover as much as possible. The licensing/litigation/general counsel extracts value from the IP by negotiating licenses and/or enforcing the IP against potential infringers, maximizing value by trying to get every advantage they can for their client. Hopefully, they also give feedback to those who select future ideas for conversion to property so that future property fits in the overall scheme of things.
Then, separately from all this, someone tries to figure out what the IP is all worth -- either for internal accounting or for reporting. This is now two degrees of separation from what I do, so it's hard for me to accurately describe it, but I assume they need to know something about what happened before and what can happen in the future to extract value (or eviscerate value) from the IP. But I think this top layer is mostly accountants and maybe some corporate attorneys, not licensing or IP attorneys.
This is the stratification as I believe it currently exists. I don't see this changing much in the near future. What I do see happening is that, as you see in any market, people who see inefficiencies are jumping in and taking advantage of them. It's a form of market correction. And I think it's a harbinger of things to come -- a shake-out of sorts at the top layer I described above.
Would I do it? First, I am interested in transactional work -- partially to provide perspective to my patent practice, particially to help me should I decide to pursue one of my whacky invention ideas, and partitially for a simple change of pace in my daily work. However, I specifically chose law over an MBA and I'm generally not interested in the accounting portion of IP.
I'm getting the sense that you're interested in some sort of hybrid account/licensing practice. The closest thing I see to that currently are those small groups of arbitragers sniffing out undervalued IP. They're lean and mean and do their own valuation and licensing. They do a lot with few people, so people tend to do whatever needs doing.
Okay, I've killed far too much of the day already. I gotta go. I hope this helps.
Regards.
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Topic: Big Four IP work (Read 2340 times)
