Restructuring Motorola’s patent function – a “prep and prosc” sub-group

When the dotcom boom busted, Motorola shrank and reorganized its 150-patent lawyer group and how it handled its portfolio of 25, 000 patents (Corp. Legal Times, Vol. 15, Nov. 2005 at 27).

One step managers of the patent department took was to form a “preparation and prosecution” group, in which the lawyers continued to have numeric filing goals, but now had to manage to a budget and now could get significant bonuses for exceeding their goals. (See my post of Aug. 4, 2005 about Microsoft planning to patent more and the comment to that post criticizing the decision.) The new group increased outside counsel usage somewhat and hired a controller dedicated to patent operations. The group also developed a proprietary database and online submission and tracking program.