Portfolio Management: Locating, Organizing, and Communicating Patent Information

The logistics of identifying, organizing, and communicating patent information are complicated because:

• Patents are unique. Every patent and every claim of every patent is different, so abstractions, summaries, and generalizations run the risk of missing or obscuring the true value of any given patent asset.
• Patents are prolific. There are millions of patents currently in force and more than 150,000 new patents are granted annually in the United States alone; many organizations are managing patent portfolios of hundreds to tens-of-thousands, as well as monitoring competitor portfolios.
• Patent knowledge is expensive. Highly trained legal, technical, and business experts are required to find and extract useful information from patent documents and their supporting contexts.
• Patent and business management resources are in short supply. The patent function of most organizations is lean, lacks the best tools, and receives little (or negative) attention from senior management, which regards patents as an arcane cost center and source of business uncertainty.

The central tension in managing large patent portfolios is that a single claim of a single patent ultimately decides an infringement suit, but numerous patents with numerous claims must be aggregated for product protection and licensing. Deep information about a patent, its claims, its technical context, and its applicability to the market is expensive to acquire. That information can also be very difficult to maintain as it grows and changes over time. Many organizations lose track of the patents they own, the reasons they were gotten in the first place, and the ways they could be applied to today's business challenges. Their portfolios and those of their competitors are just too big to be managed on a claim-by-claim basis, and they have no way to know what information is worth tracking for future use. Patent management is done on an ad hoc basis as the cost of acquiring information (often for the second time) can be balanced against a clear and present business need.