Blog

The Dilworth IP team is growing! We are excited to announce that Julie Tolek, a Trademark Attorney, has joined the company.

Your IP counsel can help you establish a culture of IP awareness among your R&D team to undergird the important work of developing your most valuable innovation assets.

Perhaps the most important role your IP counsel plays is in identifying and mitigating risks to your company’s valuable intellectual property assets.

Obtaining the services of specialized IP counsel is a worthwhile investment in the future of your enterprise. They’d be able to insert themselves into every level of your innovation architecture, ensuring you’re getting the most value out of your asset portfolio. As you develop your company’s IP strategy, your IP counsel can play a central role in effectively laying a solid foundation for growth.

Ongoing competitive monitoring seeks to create a dynamic portrait of the overall patent activity within your competitive sphere, while competitive landscape analysis provides a broader view of technology trends and developments. Both efforts work in concert with each other to help you know your competition, mitigate infringement risks, and identify licensing and acquisition opportunities. Crucially, competitive monitoring and landscape analysis help identify the guideposts for your own innovation initiatives.

The project of establishing and adopting an enterprise-wide IP strategy is a necessarily long and intricate one. Comprehensive alignment of your overall business strategy with your IP objectives may feel daunting. There are, however, several relatively simple yet deeply effective steps you can take to establish IP as a priority within your company’s culture.

There are many types of words and symbols that the USPTO is obliged to exclude from registration as trademarks, including those that are merely descriptive of the applicant’s goods and/or services and those that otherwise simply fail to indicate to consumers that the goods or services identified by the mark are associated with a particular source. Understood that way, it would seem audacious for anyone attempt to register the single most common word in the English language for their own exclusive use in connection with any specific product or service.

The next step in your development as an IP-aligned organization is to begin fostering an enterprise-wide culture of IP awareness such that everyone within your company’s innovation ecosystem possesses a mindset rooted in the understanding of the value and importance of your intangible assets, and is armed with the tools and incentives they need to effectively carry out their roles in your IP strategy.

“Aligning your business strategy with your IP objectives in order to maximize enterprise value and garner a competitive edge begins with putting in place the infrastructure to understand your company’s dynamic IP position. Maintaining an evolving knowledge of what assets you hold, the IP-related clauses that pertain to them, and what gaps you may have to address in your IP is the first step toward universal and prevailing IP awareness throughout your organization.

These systems and practices will help you think about your IP as actual monetized assets, not just perfunctory insurance. They will encourage you to account for IP as a major component of your larger business goals, helping your enterprise strategically as it grows.”

“The Dilworth IP team is growing! We are excited to announce that Michael K. Kinney of MKG, LLC has decided to join his practice to Dilworth IP as Partner. Mike will be joined by Robert D. Crawford, also of MKG, as Senior Associate. Together, they bring decades of experience serving their clients in a diversity of intellectual property matters, helping companies meet their IP goals across the innovation business spectrum in industries ranging from semiconductor manufacturing to energy, medical, and defense.”