“The pace at which inventors and engineers are creating is much faster than it’s ever been. To be able to keep up with that and to adequately address the IP needs of organizations,” according to ClearAccessIP founder and CEO Nicole Shanahan, “you really need to connect the two in a way that is seamless.”

How fast are we talking? How much cash is at play? Well, Nicole told us $400 billion is spent annually acquiring IP, and that there are roughly 32 billion concepts out there.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Nicole on the latest episode of Outsell for Startups. She’s a talented individual with a background as a legal technology founder, a consultant attorney, a resident fellow at the Codex Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and she’s doing a lot in the not just in the world of legal, but also in IP, AI, and neural networks, which just makes for an all-around interesting conversation.

If you’ve ever filed a patent or managed IP, you know it’s very painful, very time intensive, and costs a lot of money. The ClearAccessIP platform can manage all of your company’s patent filings and all of its internal IP, and it can also handle the deal flow for that IP (licensing out that patent to another company). In the past, this has been very complicated, but ClearAccessIP has made this process incredibly simple — from beer umbrellas to neural networks.

I had a great conversation with Nicole and I hope you all enjoy it as well.