Devin Morgan

Summary

MAKING PATENTS EASY My first gig as in-house patent counsel was a patent operations overhaul. It was time for Maxtor to up their patent game. I was the second patent attorney—hired as the sole attorney in their neglected enterprise division. I was charged with both outreach to the people at my site and coming up with processes that could be leveraged across our growing patent department. WHY DID THEY HIRE NEWBIE IN-HOUSE COUNSEL FOR LEGAL OPS? I started out in Big Law during the dotcom boom—jumping into the patent law deep end at Hunton & Williams and Fenwick & West. Maxtor didn’t have any questions about my legal or technical chops. What intrigued them was that I had also worked for several premier intellectual property consulting firms on strategic analysis of patent portfolios, IP training and operations, and technology licensing and acquisition. Organizing patent portfolios, improving processes, and rolling out training programs were all in my wheelhouse. By building relationships and making things as easy as I could for my engineers, we quadrupled invention disclosures in a year. Things were going well. Then we were acquired by Seagate. I was the only Maxtor attorney to survive the merger. In the end, I learned another approach on patent operations with a bigger team, managed integration of two large IP portfolios, and gained worldwide responsibility for signal processing and control system technologies (not to mention the adventure race in New Zealand), but being acquired is no fun. TOWARD A PATENT OPERATIONS TOOLKIT Fast forward through building my own IP practice, being a part-time GC for a venture-funded startup, and founding my own cleantech startup, until I ended up with Patent Law Works. I came to realize that many companies make patents way more difficult and way less useful than they should be. Outside of Big Tech, ad hoc patenting seems to be the way things are done. Each invention is handled differently. Nothing is standardized. Budgets fluctuate wildly. Frustration is rampant. People are chasing lottery tickets, not business assets. I had a pretty good idea of what some of the best practices in patent management looked like. But I also reached out to friends and colleagues in Big Tech to collect feedback and other ideas I might have missed. I developed a patent management assessment to help companies figure out where they stood—the first step of a patent operations toolkit to simplify patent portfolio development with people, process, and purpose. Please contact me if you are interested in a free patent management assessment.