I’ve been trying to predict the future of the corporate legal function for a couple decades now, and one trick used by all good futurists is to find an analog — some area closely aligned with the area of the study — and take a look at what is happening in that area. Most frequently for legal ops, I’ve used eDiscovery as a leading indicator. But it’s occurred to me lately that intellectual property may be an even better analog.
Companies realized many years ago that intellectual property law (especially prosecutions and renewals) are highly process-oriented, and they have been employing technology-based solutions, alternative service providers, and smaller law firms for many years. The process-oriented nature of IP is also why so many companies adopted strong IP operations teams long before their counterparts in legal ops. Over the 11 years I’ve been publishing the Annual Law Department Operations Survey, however, I’ve never given them too much thought. That’s why I am thrilled to have partnered with CPA Global and Above the Law on the first-ever Demographic Study of IP Operations Professionals.
While lawyers tend to fight process and standardization — they are literally taught in law school to look for exceptions — operations professionals’ mission is to bring process and business discipline. And in intellectual property, the careful management of sometimes thousands of assets in hundreds of countries can make or break a company.
And that raises some interesting questions, the biggest one being: “Who are these people who have learned how to apply strong process to the legal function?” This first-ever IP Operations Demographic Study answers those questions.
We identified 221 IP operations professionals across 138 companies and broke them down by gender (mostly men, especially at the higher levels), education (almost half are JDs, more than a third have engineering degrees), geography (more in San Francisco than anywhere else), and much more. Here are some other interesting facts we uncovered, all of which will should seem familiar to those who follow legal operations.
• Roughly 46 percent of IP ops professionals hold JDs.
• While the field is peopled by approximately 60 percent men and 40 percent women, men dominate VP and director roles.
• “Budget constraints” were identified by IP ops professionals as their most pressing challenge.
• Nearly one-half of IP ops professionals predicted their departmental budget would stay flat in the coming year.
Not content to understand who these people are, we also conducted a flash survey to understand what they do and what they think. We learned that the average IP Ops budget is three times as likely to increase next year than decrease, that eight in 10 IP Ops professionals say their KPIs are related to portfolio growth and/or size, and that more than half are the first IP Ops professional their company has ever had. It’s clear that IP Ops is growing, and we look forward to keeping an eye on exactly how.
There’s a lot more valuable information in the study, which is based on an analysis of nearly 700 companies (a majority of the Fortune 1000, plus other significant IP-focused firms). It leverages an unprecedented amount of data about the makeup of the IP operations function.
To learn more, please download it for free here.
Brad Blickstein is principal of the Blickstein Group, which has two missions: to help legal service providers better understand and serve their clients and to provide information about law departments and legal operations. He is the publisher of the Annual Law Department Operations Survey, which for 11 years has provided the most comprehensive data and analysis on the Legal Operations function.