Mike Pellegrino’s Post

I am pleased to announce that I am chairing a new committee for the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (AKA "CLOC") to help establish a set of key performance indicators ("KPIs") that companies may use to help optimize the management of their patent assets. The committee is targeting producing a preliminary draft document by the end of 2024. Use of and/or compliance to the KPIs is voluntary. Our initial charter will lay out the major focus areas; however, preliminary discussions have focused on: 1) Optimize patenting candidate selection 2) Optimize geographic patenting selection 3) Optimize fee/patent quality balance 4) Optimize prosecuting agent selection 5) Optimize patent harvesting opportunities 6) Optimize ongoing patent maintenance decisions 7) Identify portfolio risk vectors 8) Identify acquisition opportunities 9) Reduce administrative errors that impact asset enforceability The following companies are founding members of this initiative: - Kroll - Techtronic Industries - Crowe - SABIC - USPTO - Verily - EY I believe that adoption of our KPIs has the greatest potential if we draw views from a wide group of participants. Patents exist and are essential in many areas of the economy; thus, I am hopeful that we will have representation from some of the larger patent owners in communications, organic and inorganic chemistry (i.e., pharma and semiconductors), consumer electronics, networking, medical devices, universities, law firms, and others. With this post, I am soliciting for other members in the patent community from my network that have an interest in this topic to join me in this project. This is a volunteer, non-partisan effort. The committee expects professionalism at all times and no astroturfing to sabotage the effort. There will be a reasonable amount of work on this effort, with two-hour calls the first Wednesday of every month plus subcommittee work. Please be prepared to dedicate at least 40 hours per calendar year to the effort. For background, you will need to be a member of CLOC to participate. That cost is reasonable. Please message me if you have interest in participating. Depending on the response, the founding members may have to limit the number of participants to maintain quorum for calls, so please respond only if you can honor the commitment. I look forward to your helping us in this important journey to advance the patent profession.