Named to IAM Strategy 300 for 17th Time

IAM has again included me in its Strategy 300, the guide to what the publication calls the world’s leading IP strategists. This is the 17th edition in which I have appeared.

I generally do not write posts about awards, at least because most recognitions in the legal industry are, when you look closely at how they are compiled, a measure of a firm’s marketing budget rather than of anything a client would care about. IAM Magazine’s award one operates differently, however, and the difference is worth explaining to readers who are in the position of having to hire patent counsel without the background needed to evaluate the counsel they are considering. That is a genuinely hard problem, and there are very few useful signals available to solve it. This happens to be one of them.

What the IAM Strategy 300 Is

IAM, formerly Intellectual Asset Management magazine, has published the Strategy 300 annually since 2009. Notably, IAM has treated intellectual property as a business asset rather than as a legal formality since well before that was a fashionable position in this profession, and the guide reflects that orientation.

The Strategy 300 identifies individuals who, in IAM’s framing, are leading the way in developing and implementing strategies that maximize the value of IP portfolios. Readers should note what that description does not say. It does not identify the best litigators, nor the largest prosecution practices, nor the lawyers who generated the most issued patents last year. It identifies strategy, and it identifies value.

The list is also deliberately cross sectional. Honorees come from private practice, corporate IP departments, universities and research institutions, consultancies, licensing operations, and brokerage firms. In my view, that mix is the whole point. IP strategy is not a lawyer specialty. It is a business discipline that happens to require legal fluency, and the people who do it well are found in a variety of seats.

How One Gets on the List

You cannot buy your way onto the Strategy 300. I have never paid a dollar for inclusion, even though I get several calls and emails every year from IAM’s team asking me to do so. (As an aside, I wonder every year whether I am going to get booted from the list as a “free rider,” but it hasn’t happened so far.)

Selection for this award begins with confidential nominations submitted by members of the IP community, followed by a research process that includes interviews and direct exchanges with senior IP professionals globally. Qualification requires nomination by at least three people from outside your own organization. You do not nominate yourself. Your partners cannot nominate you in. The nominations come instead from clients, from opposing counsel, and from in-house lawyers who have sat across the table from you, which is to say from people who have no particular incentive to flatter you and a fairly clear memory of whether your advice actually worked.

The Company on the List

The names published alongside mine in recent editions come from Kirkland & Ellis, Morrison Foerster, Kilpatrick, Robins Kaplan, Foley Hoag, Honigman, Hunton Andrews Kurth, Gowling WLG, and Maiwald in Munich, among a great many others. These are global platforms with hundreds or thousands of lawyers and with marketing departments considerably larger than my entire practice.

These lawyers might not hire me to work at their firms. I certainly would not want to work at theirs. Nonetheless, on this particular list, we are peers.

I find that genuinely useful, and not for reasons of ego. A one lawyer practice and a 3,000 lawyer firm are indistinguishable to a nomination process of this kind, at least because the process is not attempting to measure institutional scale. It is attempting to measure whether the people who have watched you work regard your approach to IP as actually strategic. Those are two very different questions, and clients paying for the first while believing they are purchasing the second is, in my experience, among the more expensive mistakes made in this industry.

Why This Matters to Innovators Who Need Patent Counsel

My clients are technical founders and entrepreneurs. They know they need patents, they are frequently not certain why, and they are being quoted numbers by firms that never explain what the money actually buys them.

Their difficulty is not finding a patent attorney. There are many thousands of us. Their difficulty is telling us apart. Bar admission and registration tell a founder essentially nothing. Credentials are not competence. Issued patent counts tell them nothing about whether those claims will hold up when an acquirer’s diligence counsel reads them during a transaction, or when a well-resourced competitor sets out to design around them in an afternoon.

Peer nominated recognition does not resolve that difficulty. No credential does, and I would be suspicious of anyone who told you otherwise. It is, however, external to the person being recognized, it is repeated over time, and it originates with people who have seen the actual work product rather than the website copy.

Conclusion

Seventeen editions of this guide now span huge changes in US Patent law: the AIA, Alice and its aftermath, the rise (and recent fall) of the PTAB as the most consequential patent forum in the country, and the arrival of AI tooling that is currently reshaping how specifications get drafted. The market changed underneath this practice repeatedly during that period. The underlying thesis did not. Patents are business instruments, they are worth precisely what they permit a company to do or prevent a competitor from doing, and they are worth nothing else.

My thanks to those who put my name forward . . . again!