Patent Boutiques vs. Big Law: How In-House Teams Allocate Prosecution Work

Hello everyone, this is Gene Quinn. The next-than-person IP Watchdog program will be our third annual Women's IP Forum, which will take place September 23, 24 and 25 at IP Watchdog Studios in Ashburn, Virginia. Last year this program was a tremendous success and we anticipate that it will be bigger and better this year and we also expect that we will sell out. So if you're interested in attending, please don't delay. Get your tickets today. Early bird tickets are on sale through September 1st. The agenda for this program is posted on IPWatchdog.com and we already have 40 confirmed speakers with more speakers soon to be announced. As was the case last year, all of our speakers will be women. We will have speakers with varying levels of expertise and because we realize that opportunity is essential to success, we will include younger rising stars on panels along with seasoned masters-level women who are at the highest levels of our industry. If you'd like to speak, sponsor or attend the 2026 Women's IP Forum. Please let us know as soon as possible. For more information, visit ipwatchdog.com/women2026. Hello everyone. Welcome to IP Watchdog Unleashed, where each week we journey into the world of intellectual property to discuss the laws, news, policy and politics of innovation, technology and creativity. With analysis and commentary from industry thought leaders and newsmakers from around the world, IP Watchdog Unleashed is hosted by world-renowned patent attorney and the founder of IPWatchdog.com, Gene Quinn, who has twice been named one of the most influential people in the intellectual property community and recognized numerous times as one of the top IP strategists in the world. Take it away, Gene. Thanks for today. And welcome everyone to this week's edition of IP Watchdog Unleashed. This week I'm joined by Fran Cruz again. And Fran is senior vice president for IP solutions at juristat. You've met her before. If you're a fan of the show, she's been on a number of times. We're going to have her on periodically throughout this year and hopefully longer than this year to get her perspective. Fran talks to a whole bunch of law firm people and in-house folks as a partner for a day job with juristat and just has some really great conversations and comes up with some really great ideas on what it is we can talk about. So I'm always happy to have you join us. Thanks for being here, Fran. Oh, thanks. It's my pleasure. Yeah, it's been a little while. So happy to be back. Yeah, it's been too long. We need to try and be better about this. I do personally need to be better about scheduling this and getting you involved. But I also know that your vacation got a little bit in the way this time. Where did you go? It was absolutely my fall. I went to Greece for almost almost 10 days. It was an unheard of and I don't know if my mother in law is listening, but many thanks to her for watching my children. Yeah, it's unusual when we could get that kind of time. But going to Greece is a good excuse, I suppose, for anything that otherwise would be pending on your schedule. So was that a bucket list trip? Do you go there often? You know, this is the second time I've been there and I'm convinced that it's where I need to retire. So I'll start working on that financial plan after this podcast. Yeah, good for you. I'm glad that you're back. You look like you got your batteries recharged and you're ready to go. Absolutely. And it's going to be a busy May as it always is. Lots of travel. And I think we're going to have a lot of interesting conversations coming out of some of the events. I'm going to be attending over the next few weeks. So I'm excited to report back. So we have a lot that we want to cover here today and not surprisingly, when I asked you if you wanted to be on the podcast again, you said, yes, and you had a wonderful idea of what it is that we can talk about. Do you want to share that with the listeners? Yes. So one of the things I've been working on quite a lot lately is we work with a lot of both patent firms and in-house teams. But in this case, I'm going to talk a little bit about my experience with patent firms because many of them come to jurist at to work on business development pitches and to really enhance their business development efforts. And with AI, this is getting a lot more exciting because what we've been doing lately is taking jurist at data. And we plug it into AI tools like cloud, chat, CBT, co-pilot. So you get jurist at data inside of these what are sort of generic LLMs. And now all of a sudden, they're patent specific. And what they can do is for a firm identify who are good, assigned targets they can grow. They could be current clients, they could be brand new assignees. But based on that firm's expertise and their prosecution performance, it recommends assignees who might be struggling in that area. They're filing maybe not getting the performance they're hoping for. So it identifies great targets that they could go grow and help some forecast things like cost savings that they could get by lowering the number of office actions on average and the number of RCEs showcasing how many more patents they could derive from higher allowance rates. And really kind of honing in on, this is an area of expertise for us as a firm. This technology domain is something that we do a lot of and have proven track record in. And that's something where you're filing a lot. And so we can really help. And so we're building these pitch decks inside of AI takes only a few minutes now to render those things. So it's really sort of changing the way firms are approaching business development so that they can both use data in their pitch with confidence, identify really good fit candidates based on a variety of things, everything from where they're filing to the demographics of the assignee itself. And then generating pitch decks, pitch emails, things that are hard for law firms, especially attorneys who, you know, sales and business development's not their day job, right? That's not what they went to school for. They already have, you know, a full days worth of work. And so for them to do this can be really challenging. So that's been an area we've spent a lot of time on in the last six months. And one of the things I've been noticing is there's this real trend toward IP boutiques pitching their relative sort of value proposition to AM law say 200s by saying, you know, this is our area of expertise. We do patents only or IP only. And we do it cheaper and we do it better. So look at our performance metrics. Here's what we could save you relative to the work you're currently doing, maybe with these AM law 200 firms. And so I feel like maybe just because of my personal bias, I'm starting to feel like, oh, are these IP boutiques winning the day and do these big assignees with lots of volume? Do they actually, do they have this sort of firm loyalty? Do they migrate firms? Or do they stick with the same ones? So how easy is it to uproot them? And are we seeing IP boutiques steal the show in a time where a lot of in-house teams are trying to cut costs? So I know that was a really long preamble. But this led me down this path of, can I look at the data and see how are IP boutiques fairing in the last five years since we've seen sort of the economics of these in-house teams change pretty significantly since 2020? And what does that tell us about how law firms can behave in their business development efforts? And so that's what we're going to hopefully uncover today. Yeah, this is an interesting topic for a lot of reasons. I would predict going into this conversation that this is the era of the boutique boutiques have to be, I would think, on the rise. And I come to that conclusion because if I were a chief IP council or general council or in some of the organizations, maybe it's the chief patent council who has authority here as well. Whoever it is that has the authority to decide where the work goes, I would gravitate almost exclusively, I think, towards the boutiques because I do believe the boutiques offer a higher quality end product for less money. And not to say that the big Am law 100 or Am law 200 couldn't get there. But the amount of time they would have to spend in their fee structure, whether it's an hourly rate, and I know people don't pay hourly for prosecution anymore. But if it's a flat fee, somebody calculated somewhere along the way x times y where either x or y is the hourly rate that they want to get for this work, right? That's just the way flat fees work as well. So I think that the Am law 200s are pricing themselves out. So it's going to be interesting to see what the data actually shows. So what did the data show? Well, and maybe we can we can take a step back to and just kind of you and I have talked about this quite a few times in different forums. But there is a general trend right now on the in-house side where everyone is trying to cut costs, right? That is the number one theme across the board. And you know, that cost cutting is a magnitude of maybe 10 to 20% of the budget. And so there are some really common themes for what in-house teams are doing to achieve this, everything from a lot of aggressive maintenance fee pruning to trimming down outside counsel's spend. Now that comes in a lot of forms that can be you know, pressure to lower flat fee structures do more with less basically. And so no lot of the firms are feeling that that pain right now of of trying to do more while their costs are going up and at the same time, you know, accommodate this need of the in-house team to cut those fees. But we're also seeing it in the form of sort of firm consolidation. So instead of working with a roster of 15 firms, maybe you know, these in-house teams are showing a narrow it down to say 5, 10. And they're looking for what we call those best bang for your buck firms. Who does the best work for the least amount of cost? And that has had a tremendous impact on what they're spending. And one of the things that I've been working on a lot within House teams is optimization of the firms that they work with. So, for example, instead of just saying, who are the top five firms who get the best allowance rates? You know, that's kind of a generic performance oversight. They might say, in CPC class G06F, where we do a lot of filing, who is the best at that and who does it at the lowest cost? You know, who gets the fewest RCEs, the fewest office actions on an average, and the highest allowance rate, and then let's model out based on our flat fee structure, how much we could save by migrating volumes of apps from these lower bang for your buck firms, cities higher bang for your buck firms in this one technology domain. So, it's sort of like they're playing application Tetris a little bit. So, that's just an overarching trend I've experienced personally. And again, I kind of wanted to bet, is that happening across the board or is that, you know, my own residency bias? Well, it has to have be happening. And if it's not happening, it's going to be happening. So, if you and the audience haven't felt this yet, you're going to feel it. You have to, what corporations are willing to pay is less and less, and they're looking for that bang for your buck as you put it, Fran. But they're also looking for quality. I mean, because, well, let me take a step back. Not everybody's looking for quality. I think everybody should be looking for quality. Some people are just looking to get it cheaper. And on some level, you're going to get what you pay for. If you want cheap, you can get cheap. You know, I could do what's the old saying? I could do it. I could have quality speed or cost. You can have any two of those. You can't get all three. So, that's driving all of this. And I do think it has to be put. Now, the question that comes to mind here is, as you say, who's doing that at the right level in the space that matters to me? Because there are areas at the patent office still, it's always, maybe historically, it's always been this way, at least as long as I'm familiar with, 80 to 90 percent of applications in certain areas get allowed. So, just looking at the top level, which firms has the highest allowance rate, it's not going to tell you as a client very much about who has the highest allowance rate and what matters to you. I've seen as actually the in-house teams looking at really specific metrics. So, when you're a big filer, you have a lot of opportunity to lose due to minor inefficiency, right? So, if you're filing thousands of patents each year, then a small change in something like average office actions can lead to millions and wasted spend, quote unquote. So, they're looking for a lot of the sort of efficiency metrics in addition to allowance rate, and they can maybe sacrifice a little on allowance rate if it means that they're going to cut the patent expenditure significantly. However, we're seeing some folks come in and say, "I'm computer software company, and I'm really concerned with my firm's visibility to overcome 101 rejection." So, I want to look at all of my firms and see what their 101 rejection overcome win rate is, and basically optimize based on some of those things, and could we be doing more interviews in order to overcome those because it's a really subjective rejection type, etc. So, there are a lot of nuances even in what people are using to measure performance. And I think when you also have a really large patent portfolio, it's harder to get those qualitative metrics across the board. Now, I think if you have a smaller portfolio and you're working with three firms, you can say, "I just really enjoy working with so-and-so," and they have a really high quality when I review their output. It's really great. It's a little harder to do that when you have a really large portfolio. So, they tend toward, I think, a little more of the quantitative metrics when they're making some of these decisions. One thing about the quantitative versus qualitative metrics that jumps to my mind is you have to start somewhere to get your hands around what it is that matters to you. And we're not saying, or at least I'm not saying, I don't think you're saying that at the end of the day, the human just is playing this game of checkers where this is the next logical move, so you make it. Because sometimes the next logical move is not on paper the one that you want to make because of quality or other considerations or yes, it was ideal to have two or fewer office actions per case. But for a biotech company, for example, they may be queuing up a whole lot of rejections with a number of office actions because this is a blockade for them. If they can't get this, nothing else matters to the company. So, you always have to layer on the human element to look and make sure that it makes sense. But with the data and the AI capabilities overlay all this great data, it gives you a picture that up until now has simply not been available. Exactly. And I think to your point, all of this data has to come alongside the human introspection. And now I think these in-house teams, they know their business well. And so by layering on data, it gives them a much more insight about how to optimize, where to optimize, and look at such a variety of data across the board. It's not just about allowance rate anymore. Certainly, the other thing I think that is going hand in hand with this is the rise of the role of legal operations. So, at these corporations now, there's this new sort of emerging role. I don't know if it's new, new. But in the last five years, it's really blossomed. This concept of a dedicated team that exists solely to improve the operations of legal. And often it reports, it can report up through IP, but often it reports up through legal ops, which is just a shared resource across all of legal. And their role is to often manage the outside council and vendor relationships, often technology on boarding, and looking at costs and seeing where they can cut those costs. And so there's this whole organization now that's dedicated to this. And so I think it's made a lot of these in-house teams more sophisticated when it comes to thinking about which firms to work with and how to consolidate and things like that. Yeah, the last thought that I'll say before we dive into what the numbers actually show us here is that when you're looking at firms, I don't think what we're going to suggest here is that if you are an in-house team, you put all your eggs in one basket. But you want to very purposefully think which basket said who gets what and how much they get, because we all understand you need to have redundancy, particularly the bigger the company, the more redundancy you need. But I do think the days are going where you just had work going out to any number of firms, and you would have like a long arms-length roster of firms that do work for you. I don't think that's the future. And I also talked to a lot of really large companies that have are the product of maybe a lot of M&A. And so realistically, they have pockets of different firm usage that are just based on sort of historical relationships. And so they're in a period where they're saying, okay, let's sort of refine the firms we're working with across the board now that we're one entity. So there are a lot of complexities around who's working with what. But to your point, I don't think people were quite as refined about, you know, I'm going to send this type of work over here. And this over here was a little bit more of a, you know, dealing of the deck. Yeah, it was almost like next, next firm up. And that's not what we're seeing anymore. At least, I'm not saying. So before we dive in, let's start with what companies did you look at? So the data that we're going to talk about comes from where? I actually looked at two data sets and sort of combine them for this. The first is I looked at the top 50 patent filing assignees. So I looked at really large volume filers. And I chose to do that in part because they have a lot of the heat volume of work. So for thinking about where volume is shifting, we want to look at the people who are doing the bulk of the patent filing in the US. And then I also looked at just trends of distribution across the US PTO. So instead of looking at an assigned by a assigned change, I looked at, you know, who's who's getting more patent volume prosecution volume and who's getting less just across the board. And so kind of combining those. I also compared the last three years and that last three years yet ends in 2024 because of the published window to the prior, the three years prior to that. So we took them two, three or chunks and compared them. So this is pretty recent data. I'm not looking at 10 years ago. And so we compared, we define IP boutique as they're really IP exclusive or IP dominant firms. And then we looked at the Am law generalist that was basically the full service Am law 200 firms. And we compared the where the volume was being sent by these top 50 assigned ease and how volume is growing or declining across the PTO at those types of firms if that makes sense. Yeah. So let me ask you for the conclusion first. And then we'll, how did you get there? So you said at the outset, the question really was, are companies loyal to certain firms or are they willing to move work around? What do you think the data shows? And then we'll unpack it. I would say that the dominant pattern is actually more towards stability. Most companies cluster near zero change in the sense that largest sign is typically stick with what is working. It's not to say they don't introduce new firms ever, but it's more that there is a lot less upheaval of bringing on new firms and exiting old firms than you might think. What we did see was that both trends toward assigning more volume to IP boutiques and toward Am law are happening simultaneously. Let me explain. So 22 of those 50 companies, the boot Teak share was growing. So it's about 57% of these companies migrated more volume toward boutiques and 16 of the 50 migrated more volume toward AMLA. So it's happening. There's actually a bigger trend which is less toward shifting from one to the other and more toward consolidating. So instead of necessarily introducing tons of new firms, what's often happening is they're looking at their roster of existing firms and then saying, let's migrate more of the volume to my top three best performers. And so again, it's not to say that people will not move volume, it does happen, but across the board and this analysis, the more overwhelming trend was not, we're migrating away from AMLA to ward boutiques. It's that we're migrating our volume toward the best people in our existing roster. So that's gonna be both music to some years and it's gonna be a sad swan song for others because if you don't have one of those big clients yet, this data may suggest that it's gonna get harder for you to get them, but then if you do get them and you break through and maybe now you need to put in more effort to convince them to give you a chance and have better pitches, which we could talk about all that stuff. But once you're in, now it's show me the money. You know, the old Jerry McGuire, maybe not show me the money. Show me the allowance rate. Show me that I'm not spending as much with you. Show me that you're more efficient or show me that you're better in a highly difficult area that matters to me. - And actually one of the sort of high level takeaways was boutique growth is strongest at companies who are already boutique dominant and amlog growth is strongest to companies that were already amlaw heavy. So it's an interesting, it's sort of like they, again, they kind of know what they know and they're, but they're still optimizing and there's still a lot of movement. It's just often happening more within the existing roster. - So if the audience could have seen my eyes, I just rolled my eyes because I'm not sure I gave that enough thought leading into this conversation when I was looking over what you sent over to me because these are all Fortune 500 level companies you looked at, right? So some of them are amlog 200 amlog 200 dominant already and some are boutique dominant. So that in and of itself is a little bit shocking to me. I would think that for a Fortune 500 level company, there would be more of a unanimity. Are we using boutiques or are we using amlog 100 and amlog 200 and there seems to be a split just even there on that very basic question. - Yes, yeah, I think that's a fair statement and I think those who tend to work with boutiques have been an overwhelming number of boutiques and that's been sort of an intentional strategy of sticking with that sort of profile of firm. - So this is interesting because I think whenever you talk about hard numbers and data and what are we seeing, if the conversation is good and meaningful and it's gonna go deeper, you're gonna wind up with more questions than you have answers and I think I have a lot of questions. But before I go, we go down that and kick it around and what it may mean. There was a couple really insightful things that you found here as you were going through the data. You wanna share one or two of those? - Well, here's just to kind of put a pin on in it or wrap a bow on it or whatever the expression is. I wrote this note down, which is the pattern isn't boutiques replace amlog or amlog replaces boutiques. It's that the top performers at each specific client gained work and the bottom performers lost it. And so I think the big kind of takeaway for many of the firms here is that A, look toward your existing client base and understand where you fall within the competitive firm set and make sure that you're continuing to articulate your client what you're delivering to them, looking at some of these metrics, seeking to improve together because there is no doubt that these companies are consolidating and they are looking at not just allowance rate but metrics like average office actions, RCs and to the extent that you can translate that into dollars is gonna be really meaningful. So saying, "Hey, not only do I have "the fewer months to this position "and better 101 overcome win rates, "but I am saving you, maybe relative to other firms, "I'm saving you X number of dollars "in this lower RCE number. "I'm getting you X number more patents "and getting you those patents faster "which is important for your business "for X, Y and Z reasons." So I think we just need to continue to work with the firms on how they articulate their value and reinforce that with the clients so they can continue to be one of those, say, chosen few. - And it's not that hard to figure out when you throw in this next thing about the number of office actions. This just, I mean, it makes sense, but it's shocking that it is this stark. What can you tell the audience about what you found there? - Yes. And looking across the aisle again, these top 50 filers, one of the things we noticed was that there seemed to be a pretty consistent two office action threshold. So one of the things we asked of the data was, for the firms that are losing business and for the firms that are winning more business within the, you know, a sign he's set, are there any trends across the board? And the trends were primarily around efficiency metrics and not so much around allowance rate metrics although allowance rates certainly matters. You know, if somebody has 85%, somebody has 65%, that's really stark. Somebody has 85 and then somebody has 80. But there are the material difference in the number of office actions or RCEs or things of that nature. That's going to weigh heavily into the cost per application and the corporation at that point has to sort of weigh their auction of, you know, as the additional five points on allowance rate worth me spending X number of dollars more. And so there seemed to be a trend across the data of if it took you more than two office actions to get to allowance, then, you know, you were getting less and less of the volume. So, you know, it's probably true that some of these corporations are starting to draw harder lines in the sand around prosecution efficiency and just looking to compact prosecution as a, as a real metric of success. - So I don't know that if I were in a decisional position, I would, I would be that, wouldn't be that black and white, but I get it because what it says to me is is that these companies don't want to have their budget that they do have wasted with needless office actions. So the way that you may have prosecuted applications in the past where you inch forward is not keeping clients happy and not only keeping them happy, it's going to cause them to move work away from you, maybe not to a new firm altogether, but to affirm that they already have a relationship with it does not do it that way. So a lot of times when I look at office actions, for example, you will see one of two approaches, basic approaches, there's many you fit within these. One is we are going to amend nothing and we're going to argue with the examiner 'cause the examiner's always wrong. And then the other one is a variety of, we're just going to go straight away into amendments, we'll cancel clients, we'll combine clients, we'll add things to please the examiner to get something. Now, both extremes are not great, right? 'Cause if all you're doing is pleasing the examiner the client is going to be thick, wordy, perhaps not commercially useful, but on the other end of the spectrum where you're essentially wasting a first office action simply by arguing with making no amendments, offering no new claims, that has to change if you want to keep the biggest best clients happy. - And here's a funny tidbit. I think allowance rate is a little bit under the microscope right now because I think for a while, it was sort of a leading indicator of success and you can easily see why. But I've had some in-house teams tell me, ooh, that allowance rate seems too high, claims probably are pretty narrow. They're just kind of jumping to the conclusion now that the actual application itself is not that valuable. So I think there's this, everybody who's listening, I think there's going to be a little bit of skepticism around some of these metrics because there is certainly a trend in the data and in the cost structure, no doubt with the things that we've talked about today. But then there's this qualitative component that's a lot harder to measure. And I've seen people try to kind of crack the code on this, which is can we look retroactively at the patents and see how much revenue they generated for the business, citations that they've yielded as far as blocking competitors. Can we look at things like number of words in the claims that have changed from application filing to disposition? There's so many different things people are trying to quantify quality. But some of the in-house teams I think who do this really well is they, in their IP management systems, they'll review the output of the firms and then they'll kind of give a little score. It can even be a sampling. It doesn't have to be every single app, but putting in some kind of qualitative score in your systems that you can align with this data becomes, gives you much more rich measure of firm success, I think. So that's just something I've seen that I think works well that can be a nice companion to some of them or just solid numbers around application and data. - Absolutely, and I can hear the criticism in the minds of the people who are listening to this because you know, they're all padded attorneys like to think that quality matters, quality matters, quality matters, in all cases and the truth is it does not. And I think this is one of the big mistakes that individual attorneys and firms make is when they assume quality matters above all else to every client, including the -- clients they already have that they want to keep happy, which is why I think it's critical for you as an attorney or firm to have a dialogue with your clients to see what is it that you want to do with these patents. Now, if you have thoughts of monetizing these patents through licensing or enforcement, that's one level of effort. If you think this is going to be something that you're going to package into a portfolio and sell it, that's maybe a different, maybe more similar level of effort, but if this is a sea patent or this is your filing it simply because the CEO or CTO was involved in the innovation and we're doing that to keep them happy or this person's been here for 30 years, they never came up with an idea, they came up with something we're going to patent it. That's an entirely different level of effort, an entirely different level of quality that's expected and knowing what it is that the client wants. I think is the way that you keep people happy, you don't just assume everybody wants the same thing. Yeah, and I think, you know, to your point, different layers of patent value, the holy grail of this business is trying to measure that, but more from the standpoint of corporations are filing patents that have varying levels of importance to them. Some are, you know, critical patents and some are just, you know, that they just want to send them to the patent factory and get a cheap, quick patent. And so, you know, for the firms who are trying to win more business, sometimes quality alone is not enough, especially in this era of extraordinary cost cutting. And so what I've seen some in-house teams do is, oh, this is a really important critical patent. Let's send it to the expensive firm and who's going to really spend a lot of time with it. And then not to say that all expensive firms are going to spend more time with it, but you understand it's like, let me send it to this firm who maybe costs a little bit more, but I think it's going to give me really good quality. And then all the rest of it, we're going to send over here to the patent factory. And that is, I think, where, you know, quality is not going to win the volume play. And so it's, again, I think quality has to go hand in hand with cost metrics. And it kind of comes back to the firms reinforcing with their clients what they're doing from a cost inefficiency standpoint. Because right now that is, tends to be one of the number one decision making criteria. And that's just the way the economy is for these companies right now. Just the way it is. So you may not like it. I may not like it. Fran, you may not like it, but attorneys out there, patent attorneys law firms, if you're not willing to accept the reality that when you go over to and the average office actions per application, alarm bells are going to go off. Questions are going to be asked internally, whether they ever ask you on the outside is another question. So, but you need to understand and be prepared and know that and adjust accordingly. And, and I think that means working prosecution a lot more differently than it has been historically. I have some in house teams who are using jurist at to create IP policies or guidelines for their outside council firms to say, okay, we are going to look at all of the outliers who's gone beyond three office actions. Who's like, which applications are in front of examiners with really low allowance rates that were probably just putting good money after bad here. Which of these applications maybe should we appeal because, you know, at the really high appeal win rates with this particular examiner. And so looking at some of those data points to determine what to do next so they get more compact prosecution. They stop wasting money. But that's an area just that firm should be aware of is if your in-house team is looking at this, you know, and they start to see, oh, alarm bells are going off because, you know, we're on our fifth, sixth office action here. Like something is this is an uh-oh situation. That's going to be a quick path to, you know, not winning more business. And so again, like if everybody's looking at the same data, in-house teams also tend to have, you know, strong feelings about these guidelines. So I know in-house teams who are like, no RCs, not doing it. And that seems like a pretty hard line in the sand. I hope the firms are aware of it. But it really changes your strategy around prosecution. You're probably going to be a lot more interview heavy, you know, you may even change the way you're writing your claims and do more claims optimization on the front end to get you into a preferential art unit. I mean, there's a lot of things you can do, but you're probably going to be taking a different act if you know that that's the mine and the sand that that in-house team is going to draw. So there was one other interesting piece, maybe more, but one that really caught my eye when you said the biggest single shift in the patent prosecution market over this period that you looked at is the decline in specialized translation boutiques that handle Japanese origin patent applications. Can you can you explain that and why that's interesting? One of the things that we saw was that there are certain really large Japanese filers who have really pulled back on filings in the last few years. And that actually, I mentioned at the beginning of this, we were looking both at the top 50 asinies and where they're migrating application volume. And then we looked across the PTO to see our boutiques winning more, our AMOI winning more. And we saw some strange trends there. And it didn't actually, it wasn't actually because, you know, that the boutique was losing to AMOI was that there was kind of this dropout of particular companies filing applications. So the firms who had been handling those applications previously didn't have them anymore. And so we looked for example at, you know, companies like Toshiba Mitsubishi Fujitsu, and they're, you know, filing just a lot fewer patents in the US. And so you know, those, those bigger trends have sort of downstream implications for the law firms as well. Now, why exactly this is happening? I do believe that there's some, you know, currency and budgetary challenges. So the conversion rate makes it harder. I think we've seen some filing, especially in big in-house teams who are all trying to cut costs. We've seen things like, you know, just fewer filings in a quality over quantity game where, you know, people are trying to be a little more judicious about their filings. That doesn't necessarily mean that boutiques are getting less or more business. It just means that some of the firms that were handling this, these, the companies, these Japanese companies, their volume, they lost that just because they're the way fewer filings there. Now, that's not true across the board for every Japanese company, Japanese companies are still, you know, some of the top filers in the US, but there were some very notable dips there that, you know, weighed into the analysis somehow and it was kind of an interesting data point. That would be interesting to dive more into that to find out why that, that is. And because if there's some Japanese filers that have really kept up with their previous historical filing rates and then there's some that have not, it suggests something deeper within those companies, maybe a philosophical shift. Maybe it's the canary in the coal mine, though. Maybe there is a certain view of the US patent system that maybe it's not as important as it once was in order to get at least the number of patents we were getting. So I think there needs to be more on that. They need to be very carefully watched to see because these are historically very large filers. Yes, exactly. And there were a few that were just sort of stood out, like, you know, since, for example, Toshiba peaked in 2014 and has since been coming down pretty steadily in a sort of plateaued out in the last three years or so. You know, so still filing quite a few patents, but, you know, going from volumes of 4,000 in a year to 1,500 in a year, that those are pretty dramatic declines. That is a very dramatic decline in 2014 peaks my interest because that is really sort of the end of the Supreme Court assault on patent eligibility. And I wonder if that had any play in these decrease of filings. It may be dead, maybe it didn't, but again, more questions than answers. But what do you think all of this means for the firm that is now out there trying to pitch work? Let's just put a context on it. What do you think all of this means for the firm who is trying to get their foot in the door? And one of these largest filers, they have not previously done work for them. What's the right approach? What, what is suggested based on what you see? Yeah, I think first off, I still think there's value in pitching with a story that's really robust. I don't think a lot of firms are necessarily going out to a scientist and saying, hey, I analyzed your entire portfolio. I identified area X, Y and Z that you could cut costs and hear some ways that we would do that together. And I think if they can really master that cost cutting strategy, I think they still have an opportunity to win some business. And I think it just takes out a bit of a different tact. And it really has to be personalized to that end client. And I think if they can really partner with them on this overall initiative of you're trying to be more efficient, you're trying to get more patents faster, then they will hear them out. I also think it's helpful to look at the company's past sort of track record, who are they working with? Are they amenable to booties? Because they seem if they are, that seems to be a natural transition point. Have they been consolidating? Have they just gone through a rapid consolidation effort? Because if they have, they're probably not shopping for new firms right now. You know, if they've worked exclusively with Amelon, they have a lot of really entrenched firms and they haven't seen any evidence of them opening their doors to firms that look like them, then that might not be as strong of a target. You know, so it really just depends, I think, a little bit on what the firm's pitch and value proposition is and looking a little bit at the company's past and seeing how can we help. I think if they haven't gone through a drastic consolidation effort recently, they're probably in a position where they could consider new firms versus if they've just gone through a massive exercise, then I think they're probably not going to be super open-minded there. That's fair, I would say. The other thing that comes to mind when you're talking about this is in a lot of the conversations I've had with in-house counsel at our various events whether speaking live or in a webinar or something, get to know these folks a lot. I see an awful lot of really good business development and I see an awful lot of what I would call really bad business development. Listening to the in-house people, the one theme over and over and over again, I hear is, "Tell me something I don't know. Tell me something about my portfolio that you've identified that I may not know." That's going to strike a lot of attorneys as odd as like, "Well, it's their portfolio. They don't." No, they don't. These in-house teams are so small often, they're overworked, and your job as an outside counsel is to make their life easier. Figure out what are the insights that you can obtain from whatever data provider you have access to and then share that and say, "Look, our firms excels at X, Y, and Z. We notice that you have a lot of X, Y, and Z. We notice that the rates of your applications are below our historical averages, suggesting that we can do X, Y, and Z better than the people who are already paying. Give us a chance, but it's got to be some kind of information like that." These guys are getting bombarded, I think, too, with emails. You have to have something that stands out from the crowd. I feel like if we could wrap that in a couple of bullets, it would be number one, focus on what they care about, which right now is cost-cutting, somehow frame your message in cost-cutting. Two, teach them something they don't know, because you're right. They don't always know. They want you to partner with them in that strategic way. That's what we always hear, right? The in-house team wants their firm to be like an extension of their own team. So, teach them something they don't know and talk about how you could partner together to realize that. So, that they don't have to do the work. You're going to do the work for them. I think number three, make sure that you're adding some value of some kind because patent prosecution is getting increasingly commoditized. So, the best patent prosecution partners are also those that maybe deliver competitive data. Here's what your competitors are doing. Maybe that's something we should be aware of. Here's a white space analysis or a gap analysis of where you could grow your portfolio. How can you wrap up patent prosecution with portfolio strategy? And frankly, some of the bigger hourly billing items out there that these folks would maybe want to consume from you. So, what I would suggest that I'd like to get your take on this. I've been using Cheshire PT specifically for a long time and increasingly using it for a variety of different projects. One of the things I think it's very good at, it's a language model. It's a large language model. Calling it intelligence, maybe not the way that most people think it's intelligent, but that doesn't mean it's not useful. It's very good at language. And what I have found and I'll just give you a inferences. When I'm using it often, I'm trying to figure out, okay, what's the right title for this webinar or this panel or this article? And here's the article, or here's the webinar description. For example, how do we make it better? We go back and forth, we interrogate it, go back and forth to get just something that I think that I like and I assume that because it's helped me achieve that that Cheshire PT is now going to like that. For some reason, I don't know why I did it exactly about a month ago or so, maybe a little bit longer. I decided based on what we came up with, I was going to ask, it just fed it back in and I asked an open-ended question, what do you think of this or how about this after a chain of going back and forth? And nine times out of 10, if you do that, it will tell you, oh, I hate it. It's not very good. But then you ask me, well, why? And then it starts to say, okay, well, this phrasing of this is passive, this is an overused term, this is not, you're not hitting the market, right? You know, you're trying to, I always tell it, I want a Wall Street Journal level audience is, okay, this is either too high because I've focused too much on the technology or this is too low because I haven't focused enough on, you know, whatever the description is and it just is going to be a wash because it sounds like it's Mark getting copied. Very good at doing all that and I do think everything winds up getting better. So what I would suggest people do is is when you're putting your pitches together and you're going through this, how do I say this? How do I say that? There are certain words that you're going to use that right off the bat are going to turn people off. I'll give you another, for instance, in our space. When we talk about, would you like to sponsor a webinar? Would you like to sponsor a program? That's not the right way to do it, okay? Because it's comes across like sales and it's really not what we do. Well, we do more about partnering and what, with the stuff that we do, people who are involved with us, as you know, jurist has been involved with us for a long time. You're getting access to the audience that we've pulled together and that we can pull together on whatever topic that matters to us. So what we need to do is explain it in a way that gives the value proposition in language that cuts through all the preconceived notions because people want to say no. People don't want to make change. People are comfortable. They don't want to disrupt. They don't want to spend more money. But if you give them a reason why and in language that they can absorb and understand the value proposition, that's when the light bulb goes off. I know I mentioned this at the beginning, but one of the things I've been using AI a lot for is building this business development techs and not only can they build these especially clawed, build these really polished decks. So you spend less time on formatting and more time on the content. But they do a great job of sort of helping you converse with the AI to get to a point where you've really nailed down what your value proposition is. So you know, you can talk to it and say, "I'm going to run through the deck and what about 101? Where do I stand out here? Where do I win? Where do I lose? What are some things that this company could be doing better?" And you can start to just iterating with it. And I think that's what produces the best sort of ultimate pitches. You've refined maybe three to five strategic takeaways for the client or the perspective client so that they can really internalize, "Oh, I'm going to get this many more patents. I'm going to cut this much costs I'm going to really improve my performance in an area where I've been under performing USPTO averages. And I'm going to better understand my competitive landscape and file more strategically here and here. Like I think if you can really isolate that down to those meaningful bullets, you have a really powerful pitch. And then you got some powerful emails and sort of talking points too. And you go to events or call these folks and try to get some time on the calendar. Absolutely. I also think that what the AI connection here also does is a lot of times you're wordy. People are just trying to explain over and over again. We live in a sound by environment. We live in a social media world where you have eight to ten words in order to capture somebody's interest. And so you have to use them judiciously. And what I've also found with AI is very good. I need to cut this down. This is too long. This is an email or message. Even with somebody I'm currently doing business with that's going to look at this and say, I just don't have time to deal with that right now. Which we all we all have that experience. I know I do. If I open up an email and it's like takes up my whole screen and say, okay, let me mark that is unread. I will come back to that when I've got time. And then that's how things get pushed down and pushed down, pushed down, pushed down. So you have to streamline these things in AI. I think it's also very good about cutting out unnecessary words without changing the meaning. So knowing what these top 50 filers are looking for, knowing the downward pressure on fees, knowing the aversion to having unbounded endless prosecution. Now you got to figure out how do I explain my value proposition in a way that in very quickly almost an elevator pitch comes through. Yeah, it'll be interesting to expand on this data too as time goes on. You know, I think the things will change during the next few years as well things. You know, we didn't look at sort of the smaller assignees and how they're behaving. So lots of interesting, lots of interesting things to come out of this. But now big takeaways are continue to look at how you're performing and reiterate that back to your client. You know, make sure your your pitches have a lot of sort of financial and quantitative support. You know, customize those pitches based on what's important to that client and don't just have sort of a generic pitch because it's not going to resonate with everyone. You know, and otherwise, I think that the we're facing the reality, which is cost-cutting, efficiency, and working with fewer firms is the trend right now that we're in. Absolutely. I see the same thing. And what I would just punctuate it from my end is you're all professionals, which means that you are getting inundated as well on LinkedIn or in your direct email. And I can't tell you how irritating it is to get one of these things. I'm sure everybody's had this experience. Would you like to talk to me about my product? Like, no, why would I? There's no there's no call to action there. It's too passive. I don't know what you're talking about. You got to make it worth their while. people think they're going to get something out of it and because that's what's expected to the people who are winning the business are taking data like this, learning valuable insights from it and then crafting it so that they can break through the barrier. So this is a fascinating conversation here. I really appreciate you being here to talk about it. But before I let you go, is there any last thought that you want to leave the audience with today? I think bigger picture, the concept of a best bang for your buck firm is critical right now. And if you're an in-house team, you should be thinking about how you are going to measure firm success and how you operationalize that if you haven't already. And if you're a firm, you should be thinking about how do I position myself in a market like this, you know, that some of the older sort of sales and marketing tactics are probably not going to work. And so how can you evolve from a marketing standpoint in your conversations with assignees and current clients to make sure that the value they are seeking is aligned with the value you are delivering. Excellent. Well, thanks, friend. This was fascinating. I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah. No, it was a lot of fun to, you know, mess around in the data. I got really lost in it. But, you know, thanks to, thanks to some of the good stuff out there, you know, there's some really interesting trends and it's, it's been interesting to sort of inform what I believe to be true and also deepunk a little bit of what I believe to be true. 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