This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I speak with my long-time friend Jim Carmichael, who is a former Administrative Patent Judge and the founder of Carmichael IP. Jim was on the Board of Appeals and Interferences at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which was the predecessor to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Today Jim and his firm exclusively represent patent owners in post-grant proceedings, including inter partes review (IPR), post-grant review (PGR) and reexamination proceedings. In fact, year in and year out Carmichael IP ranks first or second in terms of win-rate on behalf of patent owners at the PTAB. 

Over the years we have had many conversations about the patent system, about patent litigation and of course about the PTAB, which is his particular area of interest and specialization. The purpose of this conversation was to attempt to capture these conversations and in light of where the industry is today to create a list of things that we think the Patent Office can and should do to create a better, fairer PTAB process.

In this extended 75-minute conversation Carmichael discusses ten ways the USPTO could and should fix the PTAB. 

1.     Fully reclaim institution authority. 

2.     Eliminate expert witnesses. 

3.     Eliminate supplemental preliminary briefing. 

4.     Presume nexus for secondary considerations. 

5.     When evaluating 325(d), the Office should credit 1449 and 892 forms.

6.     Terminate VLSI v. Opensky. 

7.     Eliminate reliance on common knowledge. 

8.     RPX and Unified should disclose list of members. 

9.     Require petitioners to justify reexam after IPR. 

10.   Settled expectations should mean explaining late challenges. 

In addition to the ten fixes the Office can itself undertake, Carmichael also mentions several things Congress can do, and why it is important for the Trump Administration to appoint judges to the Federal Circuit who will show respect to granted patents and patent owners. 

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This week on this edition of IPWatchdog Unleashed, we speak with Sonja London. Sonia has been general counsel at TactoTek and before that she spent 14 years working for Nokia, where she oversaw Nokia's consumer electronics licensing, global licensing program for connectivity and video codecs, and was responsible for standardization. Sonja has spent the last year as President of Licensing Executives Society International (LESI), and her time in that role is winding down as LESI’s annual meeting in Singapore approaches at the end of April. 

We start our conversation talking about London’s experiences over the last year—the good, the bad and the ugly. “There's no ugly and no bad,” London said with a chuckle. 

As London was discussing her approach to running LESI, she explained that the goal of the organization is to bring the community together for the purpose of “advancing the commercialization of intellectual assets… not property only, but assets, to bring creativity and innovation to the market, improving lives everywhere.” This provoked me to ask, so we were all on the same page, about the distinction she was drawing between assets and property, which led us into a conversation about the importance of trade secrets and know how. 

We move on to discuss culture, and lesson London learned as she has visited more than a dozen countries in her time as President of LESI over the last year. We discussed technology generally, and specifically within the automotive sector and how we are starting to see even the automotive sector new companies challenge the long-time incumbent players by rethinking the technology from the ground up. This led a conversation about agile development of technologies. And then we inevitably found our way to the most pressing business issue of the moment, the likely reordering of global trade and shifting supply chains, which very refreshingly we discussed in an apolitical, thoughtful way were we both expressed hope for the future, whatever that is going to look like. 

Our conversation weaved in and out of what is happening the moment, to lessons from the past, with both of us discussing lessons learned regarding agile development and businesses pivoting at a moment of existential thread during World War II. We also discussed the breakdown in supply chains during COVID, which caused great business disruption as the weak link in the supply chain inflicted delay and lost commerce. We discuss TRIPS and looking at the current global trade issues as an opportunity, even if it isn’t readily apparent what that opportunity is at the moment or who will have been able to seize it when we look back with the perspective of months, years or decades.

If global business, current affairs and intellectual property are of interest to you I strongly recommend you listen to my conversation with Sonja London. 

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleahsed we speak with James Edwards, who is the CEO of ELITE Strategic Services, a property rights advocate, lobbyist and is now also the author of the forthcoming book To Invent Is Divine: Creativity and Ownership, which addresses the disconnect between the attributes of creativity and ownership and human innovation, technological progress, and practical benefits from human creativity and ownership. 

During our conversation we explore the erosion of property rights in the United States, which has negatively impacted intellectual property rights, and why creativity and ownership are together the key to maximizing innovation, which is the fundamental premise of Jim's new book which will be released at the end of May but is currently available for pre-order. 

We also spend time speaking generally about how it is getting ever more difficult to bring people together to make positive change given that we live in a world today where so many people are unwilling to compromise. This is a change from years ago when getting "half a loaf of bread" was something politicians and stakeholders would see as a win, as was famously the case when President Reagan negotiated with Speaker of the House tip O'Neill. 

We also spend time talking about how many of the alleged problems with the patent system have nothing to do with patents or patent law, but are instead trade related problems. 

To order Jim's new book please visit:

https://www.amazon.com/Invent-Divine-Creativity-Ownership/dp/1956454853

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This week on IPWatchdog LIVE we present the remarks made during the Award Ceremony at IPWatchdog LIVE 2025 on March 3, 2025. Once again this year we presented two awards at IPWatchdog LIVE; the Paul Michel Award and the Pauline Newman Award. Both awards were created with the blessing of the Judges, who play an integral role in determining who to recognize each year. 

We were pleased to recognize Robert Taylor as the 2025 recipient of the Paul Michel Award. It is hard to imagine someone more deserving of the Paul Michel Award than Bob Taylor, who throughout his legal career has time and time again advocated on behalf of innovators, particularly those entrepreneurial innovators who take great risk and found high-tech startup companies, which are the lifeblood of the U.S. economy. Bob currently serves as General Counsel for the Alliance of U.S. Startups and Inventors for Jobs and is a member of the Advisory Board for the Bayh-Dole Coalition.

We were also pleased to recognize Steven Caltrider as the 2025 recipient of the Pauline Newman Award. Steve has been a leader in the intellectual property community for nearly 40 years and is widely recognized by his peers as one of the preeminent in-house IP leaders in the world. After more than 35 years with Eli Lilly and Company and rising to the position of Vice President and General Patent Counsel, Steve was not done. In 2022, Steve moved to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, where he currently serves as Vice President and Chief Intellectual Property Officer.

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I speak with my friend Jason Harrier, former Chief Patent Counsel at Capital One and current co-founder and General Counsel of artificial intelligence (AI) company IP Copilot. 

One of the things IP Copilot enables is the use of AI to streamline invention harvesting, running in the background as engineers and scientists engage in their daily activities communicating with each other. So, with this in mind I started our conversation by asking Harrier about invention harvesting, which I know from many conversations with in-house attorneys is one of the more difficult but critical important aspects of their job. We begin with a simple question: Why is invention harvesting so difficult and why are in-house attorneys always talking about in terms of what they tried in the past, what they are currently trying and what they hope to try in the future, sounding a little like Goldilocks looking for what is just right, but always out of reach.

And from there we dive into a conversation about how long scientists and engineers will typically stay with the company—his answer was 18 to 24 months—which led us to broader conversation about how many in the younger generation see work not as a job with normal hours, but a project that once done allows them to move on to whatever may be next. I called this a subcontractor mentality and wondered what this means for the future. 

We then pivot to the patent backlog—which is approximately 860,000 unexamined applications—and whether AI could help the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). According to Harrier, AI tools available today could help patent practitioners and patent examiners get on the same page and streamline patent prosecution. 

This led us into a conversation about patent prosecution strategy, overly broad claims, and how AI could contribute to streamlining patent examination through better prior art searches and with AI identifying the most relevant prior art is, which can often be quite different than the prior art applied by an examiner. If patent practitioner and patent examiner could work together with a closed universe of the most relevant prior art found by AI the ultimate output should be better, strong, more reliable, more difficult to challenge, and the entire process should be faster and more efficient. 

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we present another keynote speaker—Lisa Jorgensen. Jorgensen’s speech was given during lunch on Monday, March 3 at IPWatchdog LIVE 2025.

Lisa Jorgensen is Deputy Director General for Patents and Technology at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). And even before assuming the position as Deputy Director General of WIPO in 2021, she was very well known to the U.S. intellectual property community. Before moving to Geneva to join WIPO she served for five years as the Executive Director of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), and prior to that she was Vice President of Intellectual Property and Licensing at STMicroelectronics. Jorgensen is a friend to everyone in the IP community, and we were honored to have her speak at IPWatchdog LIVE.

The keynote by Jorgensen focused primarily on two questions. First, what are the key trends driving global innovation today? Second, what do those key trends mean for the IP community and the innovators and creators? 

Jorgensen’s keynote speech was also full of eye-popping facts and figures, including:

• Global IP filings have nearly doubled over the past decade, growing from just under 11 million in 2013 to 20 million in 2023. 
• Patents, trademarks and designs filed by US innovators worldwide have increased by 6%, 35% and 45% respectively.
• Global intangibles are valued at over $80 trillion, which is more than the world's five largest economies combined. 
• In the US, 90% of the S&P market value is in intangible assets.
• The world's leading brands now worth over $13 trillion, with 45% of the value here in the United States.
• Intangible investment reached almost $7 trillion in 2023, with the US accounting for almost two-thirds of this total.

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed our conversation is with Judge John Holcomb of the United States Federal District Court for the Central District of California, which took place March 4, 2025, at IPWatchdog LIVE.

Judge Holcomb is one of us. He was a patent professional—a patent litigator—before he joined the federal judiciary. He was appointed by President Donald J. Trump during his first term. And he serves in the Central District of California, with his courthouse located in Santa Ana, California. Early in his career Judge Holcomb was an attorney for Irell & Manella, which is a familiar name to many of us, and then also a partner for many years with Knobbe Martens.

We began our conversation with the story about how John Holcomb the patent litigator went from private practice to becoming Judge John Holcomb of the U.S. Federal District Court for the Central District of California. As we pivot from the nomination and confirmation process, I asked Judge Holcomb: Does it surprise you what you are seeing as a district court judge, or were you prepared for the wide array of different issues?

 And then we pivot to discussing patent litigation, the makeup of the Central District of California, advice for litigators, experts, the new Rule 702 and Daubert hearings and rulings on expert testimony, we discussed the role of the jury and how Judge Holcomb divides time for trial, as well as the number of patents and claims best suited for a single trial, we also discussed Judge Holcomb’s practice relating to summary judgment motions. As our conversation wound down, we ended on the topic of his judicial philosophy, and to make the point Judge Holcomb told the story of three umpires. Holcomb explains that he believes there is an objectively correct answer and that he is doing his very best to get it right.

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I'm going to talk about an issue of enormous importance. The U.S. patent system feels to me an awful lot like the Titanic right now, and it feels like we're fast approaching an iceberg with disaster imminent.

The Trump Administration is making major changes to reduce the size of government to address the $37 trillion federal debt, including withdrawing employment offers to patent examiners and firing patent examiners still within their probationary period. Meanwhile, as the number of examiners is being cut, the backlog of unexamined patent applications is at an all-time high, with some sources saying there are now at least 1.2 million unexamined patent applications pending. And against this backdrop the Federal Circuit has developed an unhealthy obsession with the doctrine of prosecution laches, which creates a presumption that patents are unenforceable if it took longer than 6 years to obtain.

With fewer patent examiners and an historic backlog it will be difficult if not impossible for the Patent Office to issue most patents within 6 years. So, it feels a lot like the U.S. patent system is the Titanic headed for an iceberg, with disaster imminent. 

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we take a dive into the world of university technology transfer with Laura Peter, who is the Executive Director of the University of North Carolina Charlotte Office of Research Commercialization and Partnerships and is a former Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) during President Trump’s first term. 

We begin our conversation discussing how Peter found herself at the Patent Office when Andrei Iancu was Director. Peter tells us that years ago when she was general counsel for a publicly traded company, she hired Iancu’s firm to represent the company. Fast forward 15 years and Iancu has become Director, and he reached out to Peter to see if she was interested in helping him at the Patent Office.  

We pivot to discuss how Peter found herself in her current role as the head of the technology transfer program at UNC Charlotte. We also spend time discussing core patent issues surrounding law, policy and the business of innovation. And our wide-ranging conversation goes on to discuss how other countries engage price control tactics on drugs, which means the United States is subsidizing drugs for the entire world, which is a trade problem and not a patent problem. We proceed to discuss startups, patent eligibility reform, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board and much more.

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 This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we take a look at the importance of data transparency and standards for artificial intelligence (AI) and standard essential patents (SEPs). Our guest is Tim Pohlmann, who is the Managing Director for the Americas at LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions. And before he joined LexisNexis, Tim was the founder and CEO of IPLytics. Tim has worked at the intersection of data and standard essential patents for a long time, and the themes of data integrity, data transparency and how data can be used to influence and inform decision-making was the focus of our conversation. 

We being our conversation talking about entrepreneurship and leadership from the perspective of a founder and owner of a company that has been acquired, which is a welcome and happy occurrence, but not without challenges. 

As we pivoted the conversation to begin discussing data, standard essential patents and artificial intelligence, we transitioned by discussing first how the industry continues to evolve and never stays the same for very long, how there is so much innovation in the industry, and how there are economic and national security implications with China understandably wanting Chinese companies to dominate the technology future and the United States understandably wanting American companies to dominate. This can lead to tensions, and China, the U.S. and Europe all seem to be jockeying to set the technology standards of the future.

We proceed to talk about the United States and China competing on technology lead us into a conversation about AI and the role standards will play, which was front of mind probably because we recorded this conversation right as news of DeepSeek, China’s allegedly new super-advanced AI, was breaking. 

As we pivoted away from AI and into more traditional standard essential patents, particularly focusing on telecommunications (i.e., 5G and 6G), I acknowledge that while there will be need for AI standardization, and there will be a lot of unique questions arise in that context, we still don’t have a lot of answers in a number of critical areas for well-known and well-established technologies. This paved the way for us to discuss FRAND and to tackle the question about whether a FRAND rate really exists in the first place.

Our conversation goes on to discuss implementers understandably wanting to pay only to license patents that cover technologies that are actually included in the adopted standard, the potential that the Federal Circuit will rule that lump sum license payments are not relevant to determining a fair and reasonable licensing rate, what considerations go into converging on a rate that is FRAND, bulk discounting, and the role data plays in lifting the curtain so implementers who are themselves competitors with other implementers can determine whether they are getting a rate that will make them uncompetitive, and much more.  

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