I deliver my speech to some business advisors that the IPO
has kindly gathered together. I tell
them that the world of commerce is like a war-zone and that they must do IP
triage for the businesses they meet, until the IP attorneys can get to the
scene. I am never short of a metaphor or
two, me.
I do not stretch the metaphor far enough to liken their
client businesses to the walking wounded, or, as is often the case by the time
they reach us, simply the wounded. I do
not mention that some of these businesses could have done with a tourniquet
first, to stem the flow of ideas out into the public domain, or with a warning
to check the positions of enemy IP snipers before sticking their new brand
names above the trenches. I am not completely
tactless.
One business advisor tells me she thinks there is a problem
with the language we use. Her clients do
not like the idea of IP “law”, she tells me, because law is a massive turn-off
for people who are not lawyers. As you
can imagine.
And I think: yes!
That is the problem! We must put
an end to our fixation with the law! There
are laws about road use and vehicles and motorists, but we do not go to lawyers
to learn to drive. We do not buy our
cars from lawyers and we do not take them to lawyers to be fixed. IP is not law; there just happen to be laws
about it.
At the start of the process, I think, we are not lawyers at
all. We are scientists and engineers,
who can understand our clients’ inventions and tell when they are trying to
pull the wool over our eyes with gravity-defying apple pickers and
statistically insignificant data (“Yes, but did you test it on anyone who
wasn’t a member of your family and eight pints of cider more dilute than they
should have been?”). We are
communicators, who can explain these inventions in a manner sufficiently
verbose and complicated, and sufficiently short on punctuation, that barristers
and judges can understand them. And we
are business strategists, who can keep the barristers and judges away from the
IP for long enough for a business to make money out of it.
We are not IP lawyers; we are IP builders. We should roll up our sleeves, allow our
trousers to sink to gravity-defying, anatomically-undesirable levels and arrive
in hard hats, with dirty fingernails, three weeks after we promised to. We should whistle a lot, and half-way through
each claim set we should disappear for another three weeks on the pretext of collecting
some statements of invention we didn’t bring with us the first time. And then our clients would feel less
intimidated. And we might not have
stopwatches and posh time-recording systems and invoices printed on parchment,
but we could still charge whatever we wanted because people would just be abjectly
grateful that we had come back to finish the claim set at all.
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