One of the strengths of Baker Botts' Intellectual Property department is helping clients develop a system to manage the life cycle of their company's intellectual property worldwide. There is more to intellectual property than just filing patents and trademarks. Baker Botts lawyers can design, implement and deliver services that are essential to a company's success.

Among the spectrum of services we offer are:

Threat Assessment
It is increasingly common for companies to receive letters threatening legal action because of alleged patent or trademark infringement. We can help design procedures to respond to these letters. Such "nastygrams" can be especially burdensome to in-house legal departments, so we have devised Web-based tools that categorize threats and provide a framework to assess and manage the risk. We are often familiar with the individuals or companies seeking remedy, and we can leverage our existing knowledge to minimize the impact on our client's business.

Audits and Categorization
Our lawyers can help implement inventor education programs so a company's scientists and engineers better understand how to protect new ideas. Additionally, we can look at a client's technology and perform a gap analysis or identify areas that could be protected more effectively. We can also compare the product mix with current and proposed trademarks to design filing and enforcement strategies. This analysis allow us to identify strengths and weaknesses in the current process and to benchmark an intellectual property portfolio against those of competitors.

Patent Mining
Often companies have more valuable intellectual property assets than they realize. Our lawyers can undertake a quantitative and qualitative review of an existing patent portfolio to identify potentially infringed or underutilized patents. Following a successful mining effort, we will create a licensing and enforcement program that could include contingent recovery or other alternative fee engagements.

Valuation
Our lawyers can help determine the economic value of a client's intellectual property assets, either with the assistance of the company's own personnel or with consultants we have used in the past. We have long-standing relationships with the major consulting firms and have worked closely with them to perform such valuations.

Baker Botts has a simple philosophy to manage intellectual property assets: put our best practices in our clients' hands. We have incorporated our unparalleled experience into sophisticated but intuitive Web-based tools for online collaboration. These tools keep clients fully informed about intellectual property initiatives and threats at all times. From patent and trademark procurement to threat assessment, patent mining, licensing and other critical processes, Baker Botts delivers state-of-the-art service to manage intellectual property.