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Portfolio Strategy

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Patent

Patent portfolio strategy aligns your filings with business objectives so the portfolio protects core technology, deters competitors, and generates value, and we build, prune, and globalize portfolios around where your company is headed.

A patent portfolio is only as useful as the strategy behind it. Built well, it protects your core technology, makes competitors think twice, opens licensing revenue, and lifts company value in a financing or acquisition. We help you shape a portfolio that does real work for the business, with engineers-turned-attorneys who can connect patent decisions to the technology and the roadmap driving them.

Where You Stand Today

Before adding filings, we take stock of what you already own. We measure the existing portfolio against your business objectives to find the strengths worth leveraging, the gaps that leave you exposed, and the dead weight quietly draining maintenance fees. We also benchmark against competitor portfolios so you understand your relative position rather than guessing at it.

Growing The Portfolio

New filings should follow the product roadmap, not chase whatever the lab happened to build last quarter. We work with R&D teams to surface patentable innovations that matter commercially, then prioritize where to spend filing dollars based on competitive landscape and how enforceable the resulting claims will be. The result is a portfolio that grows with intent instead of accumulating filings nobody can use.

Watching The Competition

Knowing what your competitors are patenting sharpens both offense and defense. We monitor their filings, track how their claims are trending, and flag freedom-to-operate concerns early, while there is still time to design around a problem or shape your own claims in response. That intelligence keeps you from being surprised by a competitor's patent at the worst possible moment.

Pruning And Going Global

Portfolios need maintenance, not just expansion. We help you decide which patents to keep, which to abandon, and which to monetize, applying clear criteria that protect valuable assets while trimming costs on the rest. On the international side, we build filing strategies that balance geographic coverage against budget, concentrating protection in the markets that actually matter to your revenue.

Frequently asked questions

There is no target number, and bigger is not better. A handful of strong patents covering your commercially important technology usually does more for you than a large pile of weak ones that are easy to design around. Focus the budget on quality and coverage, not headcount.

Prioritize by commercial importance, how relevant the invention is to your competitors, whether you could actually detect infringement, how broad the claims could be, and your budget. Not every invention justifies the cost. A clear ranking keeps your filings tied to where the business is going.

File where you sell products, where competitors manufacture, and where your likely licensees operate. Foreign filing and maintenance get expensive quickly, so pick countries deliberately instead of filing everywhere by default. We help you map filings to the markets that actually matter to you.

A continuation lets you pursue additional claims from an application that is still pending, using the same original filing date. Keeping a continuation alive around your core technology lets you adjust claims as competitors or the market shift. It is one of the more powerful tools for building depth in a portfolio.

Drop patents that cover obsolete technology, face serious validity problems, or no longer line up with anything you sell. Maintenance fees add up, so paying to keep dead weight is just cost with no return. A regular portfolio review is the easiest way to spot what to prune.

Useful signals include how well the patents cover your revenue-generating products, how often competitors cite them, any licensing income they produce, and how they have held up in disputes. No single metric captures the whole picture, so look at them together. The most important question is whether the portfolio protects the products that make you money.

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Our team

Attorneys who can help

CS
Casey Scott McKay
Attorney
Washington, D.C.
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