1745 – Intellectual Property as a Business Asset with Craige Thompson

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0:58with us right now it's patent attorney craig thompson craig you are also the founder of thompson patent law and invention to exit uh your websites by the way are invention the number two exit.com and thompsonpatentlaw.com craig it's great to have you on the show thanks josh it's great to be here. Thank you so much. Full disclosure, we're friends. We've become friends. We're doing some good work together and some projects together. But, you know, I really, I'm excited for our listener who stumbled upon this episode because I think we're going to be able to reveal to them something that they may have not really considered fully when we think about intellectual property.

1:42But Craig, would you mind if I just kind of let you share a bit about your impact and what you do and who you work with yeah it's really my my i started i grew up as from five years old working for my dad as an entrepreneur he was a pharmacist entrepreneur he had an independent pharmacy and i worked every dirty job inside that business and accounting you know cleaning washing shelves all the way up to payroll and bookkeeping when i was in college and so i really have a heart for entrepreneur and business and and so that's what led me to first electrical engineering for 10 years in the last 24 years i've been doing patent law uh for companies from those individuals to companies the size of apple google intel and honeywell and everything in between so um that's my because it's all for protecting entrepreneurs my dad when he was running his business and he had a great business going he was the first one to get into computers he was that that leading edge entrepreneur when when computers were like this big yeah and it was like seventy thousand dollars like 64k and these giant discs that were bigger than records and he was you know green screens he was way into that it was very successful and then the government changed the medicare reimbursement and suddenly a couple years later he died broke and i don't want that to happen to other entrepreneurs i mean that's my passion i'm not a pharmacist chemistry was my c in college i'm an electrical engineering by trade so uh my solution set my my gift to the world is through patents um you know best-selling author and patents.

3:35This is what I geek out on is patents and business. And my way to help technology companies bring their gifts, their products and services that are innovative, that make the world a better place, the way I feed my soul is to bless them so they can bless more lives by protecting them against copycats and infringers so they can actually bring their stuff to market, be successful as an entrepreneur, get to that successful exit from an idea, from invention to exit. That's really what it's all about. And I just do that. My secret gift is because I'm a science engineering guy, patents a natural fit.

4:19And that's my particular angle on business. Yeah. Okay. So yeah. And for all business adults listening right now, listen, you've got to protect your intellectual property. Craig, could you maybe talk about what is kind of within that scope of when we think about protecting, like what that means and what would be included in that? Well, there's four areas in intellectual property. There's trade secrets, patents, trademarks, and copyrights. So the particular area of technology is patents that that i do and as well as as trade secrets and so you know that goes everything from ndas to design patents utility patents and uh protecting your brand with trademarks and copyrights for your artistic expressions and books and things like that so um that's the world of ip my i'm an inch wide and a mile deep in patents i'm a patent guy okay um that that's just what i do and own it in in you know to address your question owning the ownership of the idea the control of the idea that monopoly pricing power advantage where you get some exclusivity in the market to protect yourself against competitors i just had a conversation i negotiated a deal just today with a client we didn't even write the patent the client came to us they purchased some patents a set of patents and then a competitor started he just came out with a product we noticed it we said hey there's a they're starting to do what these patents that you got and i negotiated them they're taking their stuff off the market we had to get a little creative to make it painless but that way it's not a lot of lawyers and you know a lot of no litigation we just make a nice business deal my client gets the exclusive right because they have the patents they didn't even invent it they You bought the patent rights.

6:17That's another way to do it. A lot of people never think of that. And, you know, there it is in practice. I mean, this is what patents do. My son asked me, how do you control it? Well, that's what patents are for. They give you market exclusivity. You get to have premium pricing power from, you know, just look at economics. You're not in a competitive situation. you get that extra gain. Yeah. And so let's talk about what the typical process is like and why it might make sense to get some assistance in protecting our intellectual property. So I find that the Patent and Trademark Office is generally pretty easy to work with in terms of government entities.

7:09Now, I should say that that is the case for very simple things. That's my experience anyway. But that said, it's easy to screw this up. If you don't know what you're doing, and there are certainly as things get more complex, if you don't have a guide, good luck. Otherwise, you're just wasting your time, wasting your effort. You're not protected, right? So can you talk maybe just a little bit about the environment for traditional business leaders? And again, I'm only talking for something really simple, like, you know, we've done, obviously, we've protected our, my influence savings angel, you know, in each of those cases, we were very, very we knew that it was just very, very essential to make sure that we locked down so that, and I'll get to a follow-up question in the future about some things.

7:56Let's, let's first talk about why you want an attorney, why you want a guide, why you want some help with this. Yeah. Well, you, I think you're talking about for your severe case, you're talking about a trademark right josh yes trade copyrights yep and those are less technical um you don't need somebody you don't need a guy that has the engineering degree and the patent bar certificate that you need for patent now you can do this yourself but it's like doing surgery yourself or landing a plane yourself if you don't have the training or you know doing your own dental work you can do it you're it's a free country but the results you're probably not going to be happy with and as a matter of fact there are four things that i tell people that you really need in order to to really improve your odds of actually having a patent that actually does something um most patents i'm going to be honest with you josh are worth a dime i mean they're really most patents are not and matter of fact we talk of the people that come to us and i don't care if it's uh inventors at honeywell or i mean the size of that company or a mid-sized medical device manufacturer or an individual with a software app app idea that they want to protect 30 of the time right out of the gate the first thing we do is we do some analysis and before we get into this we talk them out of getting a patent 30 of the time it doesn't matter the size of the company it's the idea and the this the we we've been through i've been doing this for 24 years and i've done it for the best companies the biggest number one five fortune 500 all of them all the tech companies i've done it at the highest levels i know exactly what to do and there there is people are getting patents they shouldn't get.

9:50And so that's kind of a real crusade of mine. I wrote a book about it called Patent Offense. It's available as a resource. If you want to know, like what I recommend, patentoffense.com is the electronic version. And you can get it a little bit more expensively, of course, on Amazon in a paperback book. Got it. Yep. Yeah, patentoffense.com. Yep, look at that. Written by Craig Thompson. So for the past 20 years, Craig, you've built patent portfolios for companies like, you've worked with Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Gillette, Duracell, SAP, Hallmark, Honeywell. It's basically everybody you've been connected in some way with.

10:41And so, you know, when we think about, you know, let's say that, you know, we do get, you know, we do get proper patents, we do get proper trademarks. How does that actually protect us then? mm-hmm well how would you feel josh if you're someone came up with a podcast they liked what you were doing and they came up with a a podcast called up my influencer and then he used my colors and yeah i mean just the word i mean up my influencer or, you know, that, you know, would you, like people would maybe type that in and say, up my influencer. I think that's Josh. And then they'll go there. And because they're looking for you because you have goodwill because of your reputation and your brand.

11:34And they know, hey, this is the quality that I'm looking for. I want Josh. And they end up at up my influencer. And it's some schmuck who's a copycat who realized he can get trafficked by sort of, you know sort of faking your name and tricking people um so there's you have when you build up brand reputation in your brand and your trademark it's sort of like um you know there's there's people in trademarks people come to expect a certain quality based on on a mark so if you a piece of meat right if that meat has a as a trademark a mark associated with it a symbol that's like a big yellow m you have in your mind instantly an association of what kind of quality to expect how it's going to taste where it came from and the price and you have a quality expectation if that's a same piece of it's another piece of meat and it has a ruth's chris label on it you have a different expectation of price and quality and source of that good and so the trademark it you don't want somebody put you know putting you know Ruth or you wanted somebody you putting a yellow M on your Ruth's Chris steak or something and cheapening brand you invested in building up this brand people know like and trust you and they're looking for you and then they get tricked into going to some knockoff.

13:03You don't want that. No, for sure. And what is our general recourse if someone then starts using what clearly is your trademark in an improper and confusing way? Well, this, okay. So like the example I did to just today, I just negotiated a nice, very low attorney deal. I'm the only attorney in the deal right now. So there's no litigators involved where we come into a business resolution. Litigators hate it when I talk about this, because there's a business arrangement. The guy's a business guy. He understood like, okay, we got some patents. He's, you know, let's make a deal, right? Okay. So I'm just better to get of this thing and how do we come to a deal on the business level and then just treat it like a responsible business person um oftentimes that takes the form of a license okay a patent license for example um i just spoke with the ceo of a company last night and i explained how i do licensing in a way that very few even very sophisticated ceos seem to understand and when they see it when i explain it they're like wow you know that makes everything a lot simpler and it makes a lot of opportunity for for ways to create multiple streams of passive income and in to maximize the monetization of even a single patent or a patent portfolio so there's their licensing is a great way to do of course there's litigation in the extreme where like they just go but that is very, very rare, actually.

14:51It's like 1%, you know, actually get into litigation, like 1 % of those cases actually go to trial. So it's very, very rare. There's much more commonly either they realize the patent's garbage, which happens a lot because it was written by somebody who didn't have the engineering, the litigation, the patent prosecution, or the business understanding of what the clients how to really protect the client's product um or you know the you know there just wasn't a you know they just weren't able to solve the litigation so i personally i'm not uh i've worked at the number one litigation firm patent litigation firm in the in the country for seven years i know how litigation is done at the highest highest levels for the best companies but i'm um to the dismay of a lot of litigators i like to look for business solutions to like end litigation and people can like get back to business everybody gets a patent owner gets what's coming to them and then go about your way and we're not sitting here going to court all the time that's there we know how to do that we can we can definitely go there if that's where it needs to go but very rare that's actually what needs to happen you know and and one thing i do well i wish we had a little bit more time to talk about this, but realizing that your intellectual, your patent trademarks, your protected intellectual property is very much an asset.

16:15So when we think about, and this is the whole, Craig, I think, notion behind your work with Invention to Exit, right, is that get that stuff locked down because that increases your valuation as a company. So if you're thinking long-term about where you're going to go, this is a part of the deal. If you get this stuff locked down now, that increases your value, right? And I know you could talk about this for a solid hour. And I'm sorry, I've only given you about two minutes. Because this is a really important topic in your world. It is. And there are so, every CEO that I talk to of a seven-figure, eight-figure business, they have under monetized assets that with some ip configuration um the valuation of their company whether they're looking to exit or scale uh or just create increased you know income for for the business um through licensing deals there's what there's there's lots and lots of untapped opportunity of these as you said correctly business assets that's what a what that's what how we see as patents we see patents as business assets they are just business assets you could buy them you could sell them you can rent them you can use them as collateral you can use them to enforce against someone else as a private monopoly right you can there's there's you can monetize assets and it's very intellectual property in general there's a lot of analogies to real property which people understand intuitively you know rental property apartment homes.

17:53You can rent them and make, they're very valuable. They can increase in value. They also have cashflow. Does a lot of the same things with intellectual property and even more. All right. So Craig, let's make sure that we've given folks some great calls to action now. Next steps, because hopefully we've reignited your, to our listener right now, we've reignited some enthusiasm over making sure that your intellectual property is locked down. But Craig, where should we send people to next? Well, the one thing I would say today, if you're thinking about, is my idea patentable? That's where it all kind of starts.

18:34The very first thing we do, it's been amazing. Our clients absolutely love this new thing that we came up with about a year ago, a little it before everybody started talking about ai and chat gpt we were using ai to assist our prior art searching and we've got it down to a very unique process that we developed it takes 90 minutes it's interactive it's immediate and it's dynamic dynamically um figuring out with you in about 60 to 90 minutes whether you should should stop put your wallet away don't invest in patents on this idea or if this idea has legs and might be patentable then you can take the next step but it's a great way to start it's actually a lot of times you if you were to do it the old traditional prior art search way sending it out to you know india or something you might even pay more and you get you you would get you wouldn't even get the answer to the question can i what what if anything can i patent we get we get very very clear of that in 60 to 90 minutes understanding your business your timing your technology and what you're trying and how you can monetize that and we do it we call it lightning prior art search it's lpass.thompsonpatentlaw.com lpass stands for lightning prior art search lpas.thompsonpatentlaw.com all right and we have that link, as well as the other links that you've shared.

20:06Again, ThompsonPatentLaw.com, got InventionToExit.com, and then PatentOffense.com. Craig, you've been in this world a long time. You've helped a lot of very important people. I absolutely would send anyone your way who needs to have a conversation, look at what's patentable, what's not. Craig Thompson, again, it's been a joy. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Josh. Have a profitable day.

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