This week we are joined by Shayne Phillips, Director of Analytics Solutions at Anaqua/Acclaim IP. Shayne talks about the value that Patent Agents bring to the legal industry. She explains how Patent Agents can use data to uncover insights about competitors and potential markets, and how they can go beyond the typical patent search to provide competitive intelligence and business intelligence.Listen on mobile platforms: 
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Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Marlene Gebauer 0:06
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.
Greg Lambert 0:13
And I’m Greg Lambert. And Marlene you sound like you need some cough medicine.
Marlene Gebauer 0:19
Yes, I apologize to everybody ahead of time, I have a bit of a cold. And so I’m going to try and mute myself when I cough. We’d like to welcome Shayne Phillips, Director analytic solutions. I’m not quite Acclaim IP to The Geek in Review. Welcome, Shayne.
Shayne Phillips 0:36
Thank you both so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
Marlene Gebauer 0:40
So we met you recently at a Houston Legal Innovators meeting that we set up and immediately, we wanted you to talk and share some more of your story and insights. So would you mind giving our listeners just a little bit of background on your experiences at places like Halliburton and what you’re doing now?
Shayne Phillips 1:00
Sure, absolutely. When I was finishing up my master’s degree at the University of Cincinnati, in neuroscience and biochemistry, one of the things I realized quite quickly was that I did not want to stay in the lab,
Marlene Gebauer 1:15
I already feel inferior.
Shayne Phillips 1:18
No, you know, I think a lot of folks that that receive a technical degree sometimes don’t know what they’re going to do after they walk out of school. And I had a great opportunity with having been in Cincinnati to take on an internship at Procter and Gamble, which is, of course, headquartered in downtown Cincinnati. And this was through the university. And so I did a year long internship there in a group called Corporate new ventures. So they sat at the top of one of the towers of PNGs headquarters. And it was a group that they would pull together and rotate through internal employees from all over the organization, whether that be finance, r&d, marketing, and so forth. And then new college graduates such as myself into the group, and their task was to look for and to vet new technologies for bringing into P&G. Right. When I had gotten there, they had just finished their analysis and had just announced PNGs acquisition of the items, dog food brands. So that’s one example of an outside technology are company coming into png through corporate new ventures. But while I was there, none, I should say none of the things that that I looked at invented ever turned into products that I could point to today. So they were all kind of turned out to be no, we’re going to pass kind of situations. But while I was there, I got the opportunity to meet some IP attorneys from firm right across the street from PNGs headquarters, a firm that probably many of us have heard of Dinsmore and Shohl. And I met a few attorneys from there and I helped them work on a legal opinion. I was providing some of the technical aspects to it. For something we were vetting for p&g, and right then like it clicked, the light bulb clicked like, This is it. This is what I want to do with my life, you know, that kind of thing. So when the internship ended, I just moved across the street to Densmore, I actually was offered a job there in their IP group. And I was doing things like prior art searching for patentability purposes, or Literature Searching for supporting them with their freedom to operate opinion work, working with the librarian at the firm on what search tools they should have for the VIP group, and best practices around that. So I got to do a lot. It was an amazing experience. And I it was my only time at a firm and my only time ever having to build my time in six minute increments, which that was certainly an eye opener. And for anyone I would say if you haven’t had the opportunity, go work at a firm, you’ll understand many things after you do that.
Marlene Gebauer 4:07
You haven’t experienced that joy, you know, please, please try it out. Absolutely.
Shayne Phillips 4:13
Yeah. So So I learned a lot from there. But I ended up moving to Columbus, you know, from Cincinnati to Columbus to take on an opportunity at a company that creates databases for patent and non patent literature related to chemistry and biochemistry. And so this organization is called Chemical Abstracts service. They’re wholly owned by the American Chemical Society. They’re completely nonprofit. And they started out of the Ohio State University so they actually have a prime piece of land where Cas is property is on the edge of the university campus really close to the horseshoe. So it’s a it’s a great spot. And what Chemical Abstracts service does As is the patents in the non patents when it comes to chemical structures, it’s obviously very difficult to take three dimensional things as chemicals are, and turn them into two dimensional things that people can then search. And so they have a whole group that they call their editorial group that does nothing but create those connections between here are the three dimensional chemical structures being talked about in this patent or this piece of non patent literature. Here’s how we’ve transformed it. So folks can actually find that literature moving forward. So I got the opportunity to work in editorial for a few years. And then I moved to their sales and marketing team, traveling the country training folks on how to search the Chemical Abstracts databases. So my territory was a geographical territory from mid Indiana, all the way to the West Coast. And it didn’t matter what the what the company was all about. They had pharmaceutical companies, chemical companies, oil and gas companies, you name it, I have them as my clients. So that’s how I ended up at Halliburton.
Marlene Gebauer 6:12
Yeah, I remember Chemical Abstracts. Like I remember actually reading some of that stuff, you know, from as a researcher having to use that for our IT team.
Shayne Phillips 6:22
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s how I met the folks at Halliburton that I ended up coming to Houston. And taking on the role at Halliburton. They were a customer of mine from Chemical Abstracts. And I used to visit Houston and go to their facility for training and other purposes quite regularly. And when an opportunity opened up, they asked if I would like to, you know, come on board. And I have to say I was born and raised in Ohio. And I had not left Ohio yet. Yeah. All my schooling was there. All my jobs were there. So so the opportunity to potentially move to Texas was like, wow, I have never thought of that. And nor did I ever imagine working for an oil and gas company either. I really thought I would stay in health care biopharma, you know, that kind of area. So it’s just one of those things, I think to two bits of wisdom I learned was, you know, never pass up an opportunity. Like the internship I, I had, while I was just graduating from UC, and never pass up a job opportunity, even if it sounds really far out there, because you just never know. So I moved to Texas from Ohio in the middle of the summer, very hot and humid. And I stayed at Halliburton for 16 years. And I really loved my time there. I still miss my team after having left there now for almost three years. But at Halliburton, the group that I was in is called intellectual asset management, they sit under the patent liaisons are, are pushed out through the research organization, their direct managers are those vice presidents of the different research teams. And then there was a small group of which I was one of them that sat under strategy. And the idea was that I would push Halliburton patent portfolio from a business and strategy perspective, rather than having to get in the weeds of the legal side of patents. So our team, their team, now, everybody is either a Patent Agent, or a technical person, and they are not allowed to be attorneys. So they are not representing the company as an attorney. And that gave the group a little bit of freedom to do some more business type work and not have to kind of worry about the legal side of things. So we worked really closely with inside counsel, the IP attorneys at Halliburton’s team inside counsel, and sometimes with outside counsel, just depending on the relationship our inside attorneys had with outside counsel. So that was the relationship I was under that central group trying to push consistent processes across the entire organization. So I was in charge of broad competitive intelligence, trying to pull in market intelligence and business intelligence and mix it in with technical intelligence that we were pulling from the patent and non patent literature, you know, trying to create work product that the C suite or an upper management could use to make good decisions about what they wanted to do with the patent portfolio at Halliburton, with data behind it actual data behind it rather than just hunches or feelings about things. So that was my role while I was at Halliburton. So now today I am at an aqua so when I left Halliburton, I did leave because of you know, the pandemic and the downturn in the oil and gas industry. that actually had started just before the pandemic began. So when I left, I really didn’t know what I was going to do next. And I ended up at a NOC was so a NOC, what is another, you know, outside third party provider of services to the IP industry, not like Chemical Abstracts service who were producing databases, but rather an aqua create docketing tools for IP and trademark attorneys. Their dockets are so complex because of the many dates that they have to keep track of, and the many jurisdictions around the world they have to worry about. So they need specialty type of docketing products. And then they also make an analytics tool called Acclaim IP, which is what I have become somewhat expert on. And that’s what I work with clients on or potential clients on is the use of Acclaim IP for analytics purposes.
Greg Lambert 10:55
All right, well, first, I want to back up to something that you mentioned initially with your job, right out of college. And that was, you know, you had had, I guess, pitch some potential products out there. I’m curious, do you remember any of the, the ideas that that you came up with and pitched?
Shayne Phillips 11:15
Well, so I wouldn’t say they were my idea, go ahead and call you but they were things. They were things that were either unsolicited coming in to PNG from, you know, some functional mailboxes or things that others have seen out there. So of course, there was one on a kind of a diet program, but it was more of what I would call a lifestyle type of diet program. That the, you know, obviously companies like p&g, consumer products, companies are always thinking about how can we look at a particular demographic of our customer base and help them with things that they are struggling with, like, like weight loss of courses is one of the big ones. But but being able to sell a whole suite of products potentially. So not just foods, but also lots of other things that could tie on to a weight loss type of program or lifestyle. Another one, gosh, had to do with fertility tracking for women who are either not wanting to or desiring to know the status of that. So so those were a couple of the things that jumped to mind to me. But like I said, None of the ones that I’ve truly, really worked on actually ever made it out to out there that p&g sold or sells,
Marlene Gebauer 12:37
I also wanted to reflect on what you were saying that, you know, you were adding business intelligence and competitive intelligence to technical information. And I picked up on that, because I think, you know, in firms, we struggle a little bit about like, okay, and you know, how do we kind of combine some of that type of information with, you know, say legal advice and sort of using that type of information as a way to better understand your client know, your client, understanding that that’s valuable, just to have kind of conversations to understand what from a business perspective as opposed to a legal perspective, or your clients really, really struggling with because that, in turn, can lead to further conversations. So I thought it was interesting that you did that. Was that kind of the thought process of doing that? Or were you thinking something else?
Shayne Phillips 13:27
So I think personally, that some Some law firms are hesitant to kind of go that way only because they are so crunched for time, they become very transactional, because that’s what’s expected of them. And that’s what you know, their bread and butter. So taking a step back and having the time to do the type of business intelligence and what I’ll call landscaping work that is required to to gain that insight and knowledge is a little bit time consuming, especially if you’re not used to doing it. So a lot, some firms will outsource it to somebody like myself or, or a NACA has a client services team. And but that is something I tried to teach with clients and potential clients is there are some processes that you can put in place that as long as you’re consistent with it, you keep it rigid and you don’t give up on it. What you’re going to get out of it at the end of the day is just a goldmine of information. If you would be so surprised how much patent data and information is out there publicly. The pat the US Patent Office especially they they put out data on everything about their examiner’s how long how many days an examiner has had a an application sitting pending with them. How many times has the examiner sent you know,
Marlene Gebauer 14:50
how many rejections they sent back,
Shayne Phillips 14:53
back to outside counsel, and yep, all of that is tracked all of that is taken into consideration and It could be I call patent data, even if you’re not, you know, you’re not a company that gets a ton of patents. I call that like a window into the soul of a company in some fashion with their r&d teams and with what they’re thinking patents since direction they’re going exactly, because since they take so long to to file and then come to grant, they’re really there’s a there’s a commitment there that a company makes that becomes a bellwether for what they might be thinking about in the future and not looking at it is to me, like, why why would you not look at it, but some, some organizations, they don’t, you know, they have the the philosophy of we don’t allow certain teams in our organization to see the literature because they’re worried about certain duties of candor and certain risks, that comes with full full knowledge of certain things. So it really becomes an opinion, I guess, or philosophy of a company, whether they’re going to allow that to be the case or not at their organization. But law firms, I think they can look at what are our competing firms looking like when it comes to their performance? Is my client moving in a new direction, technology wise, that may require us if we want to keep up with them to hire different patent attorneys that have a different background than than what we have on staff now, you know, things like that, that becomes leading indicators for your firm, really, if you see a competing firm starting to nosedive, maybe in perceived quality of their prosecution work, it’s an opportunity to maybe approach that that company and say, hey, you know, we think we can do better, potentially, it becomes a really powerful piece of business intelligence for firms.
Marlene Gebauer 16:55
There’s a lot to be said, for mining public data. And and firms have only just kind of hit the tip of the iceberg on that. I mean, you’re talking about patents, there’s dockets, there’s, you know, SEC filings, there’s there’s all kinds of things where you can mine that type of data, and, you know, firms should take advantage of it. I agree.
Greg Lambert 17:13
I love how polite Shayne was in saying how, how bad we were at this, this type of stuff. So I’m sure I’m sure everyone appreciate you kind of inherited on that. So one other thing that that you mentioned, with your work at Halliburton was that the patent agents could not be attorneys. So I know, there’s probably a number of people listening to this, that may not be familiar with what a Patent Agent does. Can you give us kind of a, you know, an overview of what a Patent Agent is, you know, what kind of background do they need or education and kind of what what’s the daily routine of a Patent Agent? And what do they bring to the organization?
Shayne Phillips 17:58
Oh, sure, absolutely. So a Patent Agent is not an attorney. So when I say not an attorney, I mean, not a straight up regular went to law school type of attorney, to become a Patent Agent, or to become what we call in the United States, a patent attorney, you no matter what you have to sit before what they call the Patent Bar. The Patent Bar is not like a regular bar exam, where it’s like a three day test. The Patent Bar is 100 questions over an entire day period. And it’s testing the subject on a huge set of manuals called the manual of patent examination procedure, which we call the MPEP. And the MPEP is given to all examiner’s to learn how to examine application. So it’s, it’s a little bit interesting in a way because patent agents will go we going up quote up against tick examiner when they start doing prosecution work on applications, but yet you’re tested on what the examiners need to know about examining applications. So it’s, it’s interesting, but it’s been the way it is, that’s way at the USPTO for many, many years. So you take the Patent Bar, you hopefully pass in order to even be invited to sit for it, you must have a technical degree. It needs to be in a hard science. There are certain even edge sciences that they don’t accept. They are looking at redefining
Marlene Gebauer 19:29
their like library science.
Shayne Phillips 19:32
Well, political science like that nature. They don’t allow or they don’t probably would not agree to that. They are looking at reworking the degrees that they will allow because of the fundamental changes in technology just in general. So some of the biology type degrees, they would say was not a hard enough science, but we are moving so far into the bio areas that they’re looking at that they I also noticed very recently that women who are getting technical degrees are in these edge areas and the number of women that are being accepted to sit before the Patent Bar had started to drop. So they are looking at that as well, because they’ve noticed that shift in the university degrees that people desire to get a degree in, you know, still being technical. So you submit your application and your school transcripts, and you’re either accepted or not, and then you take the bar and you hopefully pass, then you have to sit for a while for a clearance personality type clearance. And then if that goes well, you are receipt, you receive a registration number with the PTO. So you are now a Patent Agent, not a patent attorney, those that have a law degree both have to pass their regular bar exam and the Patent Bar to become a patent attorney. But with a an agent, once they get that registration number, they can draft patent applications, they can file and prosecute those applications all the way to grant, they can even potentially help pay maintenance after the patent was granted. But that really kind of ends their responsibility or their their allowed ability to help clients. Anything that becomes much more transactional or litigation or anything like that is of course moves over to the realm of the attorney. So that’s what a Patent Agent does. And, you know, when I was at Densmore, I don’t believe I could be mistaken, but I don’t believe they had any patent agents on staff. This was a number of years ago, this was over 20 years ago now. And I know they do have patent agents today. But a lot of law firms really only had patent attorneys on staff, they hadn’t really thought about, oh, let’s hire some agents to help us with our prep and process. And they don’t have to always be an attorney. And so I know, a number of agents working at law firms now, myself working in intellectual asset management, I believe, I’d say half of my cohort at Halliburton were agents and Halliburton paid for our training to to sit before the bar and paid for the examination fees, and then gave us some really nice stock options when we passed. So they encouraged it, they greatly encouraged it. And it just, it helps you when you’re dealing with counsel and when you’re dealing with the researchers, because you you know a little bit more about what likely will make it to granted claims versus not. And it allows you to speak a little bit more coherently, likely with counsel. So that’s, you know, an agent gets to do lots of things that maybe an attorney might be precluded from doing,
Greg Lambert 22:47
I can say that law firms are pretty myopic when it comes to who they think, can work in the law firm. And, and also, we can issue stock options. So that’s that might be another thing.
Marlene Gebauer 22:59
And I will note that I’m a little sad that Kim Kardashian can’t just study for this, that she actually has to have a technical degree because that would be fun. Shayne, where’s the profession going? Now? I mean, you you mentioned, sort of, you know, when you were at Halliburton, there was lots of opportunity. And the firm, you know, paid for this. And they were very eager for people to sort of get into the area. Where is the profession generally going now? You know, what are some of the issues that you faced over the past few years? And what do you think some of the pain points the profession is facing at the moment?
Shayne Phillips 23:37
Yeah, so I definitely think we’re all suffering from what I’ll call data overload. There are just hundreds of millions of patent records out there now, not even to talk about non patent literature, and what constitutes prior art. Now, you know, what, what is still new, and can can become patented for my client, that just keeps seeming like a target that’s getting further and further away. And I think everybody feels that way. So we’re all struggling with their data overload. There’s so much out there, how do we get at insights through all this noise? And so that’s something I discussed a lot with my potential clients and my clients because we’re, they’re all struggling, they’re all in that same boat. And one of the things that I was just having a conversation with one of my former co workers about was the fact that it’s really hard to take highly technical literature and put a business lens on top of it. You know, why should the business care about this? What products what services? What areas of where we make money? Will these patents potentially harm us? That is no easy feat for any company at all. And so that’s big. That’s the big pain point right now, I would say Where I think it’s moving, is software is getting there, it’s slowly getting there to help with this problem. So artificial intelligence is obviously here to say it seems to be all over the place, and everyone’s talking about it. But we are seeing a lot of interest from clients and from artificial intelligence software creators asking to work with us in order to work with our clients on how can we create software to help with Intellectual Property Management and cutting through the noise? And our clients are saying, or potential clients? How can you help us with software to wade through all of this? So it’s both a pain point and an opportunity. And I just see AI creeping further and further into IP management. It’s just inevitable to me,
Greg Lambert 25:50
yeah, one of the things you said was, it’s really difficult for a company to look at highly technical documentation, on products, ideas, and figure out a way to make that a part of the company to look at the profitability of something and in kind of, to me, it sounds like all that that technical jargon is not telling the story that needs to be told to the people that need to hear that story. So I’m curious, is it going to be the technology that ends up telling that story? Or is it going to be the is it gotta have a human element in it to relay that value? That’s in those technical documents?
Shayne Phillips 26:34
I do think, you know, there’s a human element there. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes patents will be written purposely vague, in order to, to do exactly what we don’t want, which is, we don’t want anyone to really find this, we want to have it, we want to get claims. But we we want to kind of go under the radar. And hopefully our competitors don’t see this. And you know, if they start to infringe, then, you know, we gotcha, that kind of thing. So you’ll see, just as an example, you’ll see something like a downhole treatment fluid. Well, what, what is, what is it going to do down the hole? You know? And you have to really read through that, just to find out what is it and what is it doing? And so when somebody like myself is setting up, for example, current awareness alerts, where we use key words, and have the data, have the software search the databases every week, or every month to look for new publications that have the key words I’m looking for. If it’s something as vague as that, yeah, we could put a query together that says, you know, downhill fluid, but someone then needs to say, well, what is it? What what part of the company is this affecting? It’s that piece that is very human intensive. And that piece that I think in the future AI will hopefully get at. But yeah, it’s not easy. And it’s so strange today. It was really interesting. Halliburton was sued for patent infringement on three patents from a company called us well, services. And the judge’s order on that case just came out two days ago, and I read about it today. And Halliburton was able to counter argue, on references that actually knocked out the US well services, many of their claims of their patents, not just we are infringing, but you shouldn’t have even gotten these patents in the first place. And here’s literature that you should have found and known about before you put this case out there. So I mean, if there is not an example of knowing what’s out there, knowing what you have and what what is out there in the in the oil and gas industry or in your industry, I can’t think of a better one. And it came out this morning, just before we were going to sit down and record this podcast. So yeah, it speaks volumes when you can not only knock out a suit against yourself, but you can turn around and and really get at that competitor as well, in the way that Halliburton was able to do.
Greg Lambert 29:12
Shayne, I noticed that you’re a member of the licensing executives society. Do you mind just telling us a little bit about what LDS does and what your involvement is with the society?
Shayne Phillips 29:23
Sure, yeah. So the licensing executives society, it started in the mid 60s. So it’s actually been around for many, many years. And it’s an organization, a professional organization of licensing executives, you know, those would that have kind of that business hat, researchers, attorneys, of course, lots of attorneys, and others that touch the whole space around licensing. They have besides the USA, Canada, which is the Las branch that I’m at home at here in the United States, there are 32 disser organizations have led us around the world that cover geographically over 90 countries worldwide. And their idea is to push consistent practices around licensing. They just recently received two standards from antsy. One of them is called intellectual capital in the boardroom. And this is the idea around a standard to mitigate risk when you have business executives in meetings with suppliers or competitors. And they’re talking away and maybe talking a little too much. And what not two or three cocktails, they might accidentally object cocktails, yes, yeah. So they might accidentally remove the ability to to obtain intellectual property rights. So that’s one of their standards. And then their second one is management systems for protecting IP in the supply chain. So once again, when a company is looking for materials, and they have certain requirements for those materials, they often are tipping their hand at what they’re up to what they’re going to use the material for, potentially, and, and things of that nature that once again, if a supplier knows what you’re up to, and can beat you to the patent office, they can not only get a patent for a material you might need, but they can also get a patent for the use of the material in a certain fashion. And that could certainly cause an instance where if they are the sole provider of the material and the use of the material, you have to undertake license agreements with them rather than just straight up purchases. So those two standards were just recently adopted by antsy related to intellectual property and licensing. And then the other thing I would say is they work very hard on making licensing easier and more, less scary, I will say for small startups, for those that are coming out of let’s say, an incubator or a university where they might be pitching their technology for license to a huge corporation. And there’s a power imbalance that we want to get rid of. So we have best practices not only for what what a small startup might need to be on the lookout for, but for ethical behavior that we expect from our corporate members. So that’s kind of the what Le S does. My involvement has been at the Houston chapter level, it’s very, it’s a very active chapter of LPs, we have quarterly meetings, and we bring in a lot of, of course, oil and gas speakers because of the industry that’s prevalent here in Houston, and then also healthcare as well. The Texas Medical Center, at least by square footage is the largest medical center in the world. So we have a lot going on there. And then at the national level, I’ve helped with planning events, I am the chair of the physical sciences industry sector, and that sector covers energy, environmental chemicals, and material science. It’s one of five different sectors that the LS has. And then more recently, I am planning an event here in Houston in February of this year, called the young members Congress. So the young members group started internationally and in USA, Canada, about 10 years ago with a goal of trying to bring in younger professionals to LDS and to bring them content that is meaningful to them. So I don’t know about the both of you. But there are some certainly some professional organizations that a lot of their membership just gets older and older and older. And we we see a vacuum of the younger folk
Marlene Gebauer 33:57
needs to bring the new people in yes, they’re
Greg Lambert 33:59
filled with with experiences is how we put that we call them extremely wise.
Shayne Phillips 34:08
the young members Congress, what we do is it’s a one day event, it’s always on a Friday so that we can have a huge blowout networking event after the content is over. So you know, you pace yourself. If you can stay on out all night long, you’re welcome to do so. But if you can’t just send yourself back to your hotel room. But but the networking component is is huge for young professionals. They are always looking to build their networks and to get speaking opportunities as well. So that’s what the young members Congress was set up to do and to be and it’s been it’s been going strong. The event here in Houston will be the first one for USA Canada and Latin America since before the pandemic so we’re really excited to have it in person again this year.
Marlene Gebauer 34:55
I’m going to ask you like a two part question. Your title right now is director of analytics solution. And you know, we’re real big on talking about analytics here on the podcast. So what is analytics mean in your role and what the value is at your place of work? And what do you think that firms can learn from this in terms of how you’ve set up the analytic solution process at an aqua?
Shayne Phillips 35:22
Sure, yeah. So my role in analytics, using Acclaim IP is, you know, it’s not super statistics heavy, I don’t have a statistics background. So that’s not like my my comfort zone. But it’s once again, it’s taking broad sets of data, to look for insights in what your competitors are up to, where they might be going with their technology. So you can look at things like what patents did they spend all this money to get granted, and then they haven’t paid maintenance on them. So they’ve let them die before their you know, their statutory term that really gives you an insight into okay, they might be leaving this this potential market for whatever reason, what countries are they now filing in where they maybe hadn’t before with that particular technology? So is there something they don’t know that or they know that we don’t know about a particular geographical region, just as an example, what we see a lot of the time is patent practitioners, those that are especially are doing prosecution work, are really focused on finding just a few references that they need to to answer an office action from an examiner or to conduct a freedom to operate opinion piece. And once they found those references, they’re done, right? They’ve met the task. they’ve searched the literature, they found what they needed, and they’re gone. And r&d is like that, as well. You know, researchers will often use the patent literature just because it is a huge body of technical literature, regardless of the legal aspects of them. And once they find the answer to that technical question, they log out, what I do is I take 1000s upon 1000s of patent records, and look for the trending over time and look for those those insights that you wouldn’t appreciate if you didn’t actually take that massive data set and run your metrics on those. So I call it it’s not the 50,000 foot view, because to me, the 50,000 foot view is an actionable you could tell upper management. Oh, you know, Halliburton has one and a half times more patents than Schlumberger. Well, so what? So what is what’s the action there. And then you have those that I call in the trenches, they’re down in the weeds on the ground, doing the the work that needs to be done for prosecution, and FTO. And patentability. But I want to be somewhere in between, I want to see the the, the forest for the trees, but I don’t want to be so high up that people can’t take my my information and make a good, actionable decision on it. So that’s where I sit. That’s what I tried to do and try to show my clients and potential clients. And it’s a process, you need to set up this rigid process where it’s repeatable, it’s growing over time, and it can be queried, as needed by management, when they ask because they will ask so I can just imagine, when US wall services filed their suit against Halliburton, the first thing that counsel at Halliburton said was, what do we know about this technology, you know, right away. And so when you have that building, knowledge base, that you have rigidly created over years, and over time, it’s there for you to to kind of go into and plunder as you need to. And that’s, that’s what I’m trying to get at and get folks at and for the law firms. Yeah, they might not want to have all that data, of course. But periodically, I even say just take the patents from your client, once a year, take them and just run some basic statistics on them. And see if you see a difference in what you expected to see or not. And just just take a broader view every once in a while, have the data that you find yourself working with every day,
Marlene Gebauer 39:22
run it against their biggest competitor, like do that once a year against their biggest competitor and see and compare them. Yeah,
Shayne Phillips 39:28
absolutely. Absolutely.
Greg Lambert 39:30
So Shayne, come to the part where we’re going to ask you our crystal ball question. What do you see as a major change or a challenge coming up on the horizon that you’ll have to face over the next three to five years?
Shayne Phillips 39:45
So I did mention this earlier, but it’s definitely worth repeating and that is the fact that I do think AI will be more and more prevalent and in use in IP management in Patent Prosecution patent drafting type work and will really infiltrate the IP services and industry fundamentally. We’re not there yet but we are so close and I do think that’s it’s just on the horizon. Short and sweet.
Greg Lambert 40:16
Just like we like it usually usually we get really long crystal ball questions but you get right to the point there so I like it. Well Shayne Phillips, a director analytic solutions at an aqua Acclaim IP. Want to thank you very much for taking the time to come on the show and talking with us. It’s been it’s been fun.
Shayne Phillips 40:37
Thank you so much, again, for having me. I really, I really enjoyed this. And I really appreciated the invitation.
Marlene Gebauer 40:42
Thanks to everyone for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,
Greg Lambert 40:54
And I can be reached @glambert on Twitter. Shayne, how about you are you got a Twitter handle?
Shayne Phillips 41:00
I do but I don’t know it off the top of my head.
Marlene Gebauer 41:03
We’ll put it in the show notes. And so if you guys don’t have a Twitter handle, you can leave us a voicemail on our Deacon review Hotline at 713-487-7821. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry.
Greg Lambert 41:19
Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene, I’ll talk to you later.
