This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we have a special conversation that was recorded at the end of our AI 2025 program in front of a live studio audience.  Joining me were Stephanie Curcio, Clint Mehall, and John Rogitz, who along with Wen Xie, make up the new IPWatchdog Advisory Committee. Each of these people have been long-time attendees at our events, they often speak on panels, they often written articles for us, and now they will help advise me with respect to programs and continue to provide content for IPWatchdog.com.

We begin our conversation by asking the panel if there was anything that they heard during our AI program that was surprising. Rogitz said it was a concerning change in tone from technologist Jason Allen Snyder who in years past was pumping the breaks on worry about AI, but this year talked about it using terms like "existential threat." Mehall also picked upon predictions from the technologists panel that AI could achieve consciousness in 13 to 15 years. Meanwhile Curcio focused in on quantum computing, which seems to be the future, but is difficult to grasp and may face an uncertain patent landscape. 

After spending time discussing patent prosecution strategy for AI, we next turn to data protection and trade secrets, which I personally think we didn’t spend enough time on this year and plan to spend more time on next year. To jumpstart this part of our conversation I set the table by saying that not all data is created equally. There is the data that is collected and imported into AI tools and processes, and what is particularly valuable is the insights from that data, which is a different form of data itself. So, I asked: What should do companies be doing? What are the best practices for identifying and protecting valuable data in the AI age?

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we have a conversation with two shareholders from Wolf Greenfield. Ed Rassavage and John Strand were both speakers on our recently concluded AI 2025 program. As the program was concluding, and in front of a live studio audience, we sat down to discuss the current state of the industry from a client’s perspective. 

“It’s a lot of wait-and-see unfortunately,” Strand said. “The companies that have come to us for risk assessments mostly are mid-sized to larger companies that are very data heavy driven companies that are looking to use AI to enhance their data and extract value from it in some new way.” 

For Russavage, who is a patent attorney with 30 years of experience working in the software industry, the question for many clients relates to patent strategy, which can be extremely important given that so many AI companies are small companies, but the industry has some very large players. “We just tell folks file early file often and try to file something good. We use a lot of provisionals these days. Filing them within the matter of weeks or months not not years…So, it's it's a little bit more aggressive than it was for just typical software companies in the AI realm.”

Our conversation then pivoted to trade secrets, and the role of trade secrets for AI companies given that the data and insights gained from data can be extremely valuable. From here we proceed to discuss trademarks and the problems presented by an immature industry that hasn’t yet settled on what terms are generic and how that will impact trademark selection (and retention) and whether and to what extent AI platforms will face copyright infringement liability for using training data without permission and for the outputs from generative AI tools. 

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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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