Operations

Unified is hiring for full-time Senior Patent Counsel - Apply Today!

Click HERE to apply

Unified Patents is again growing its legal department, and seeks to add an experienced, registered patent attorney. Applicants should have at least 5 years of law firm or other relevant experience before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), in particular working on ex parte reexamination proceedings, post-grant petitions (IPR, PGR, and CBM), or other administrative drafting and litigation experience.

Applicants should have a strong technical background and be willing to explore diverse new technologies; experience with video codecs, coding, cryptography, compression, signals, wireless communications, or other algorithmic subject matter is a plus. Patent examination experience is a plus; a registration number is a plus; clerking experience is a plus; familiarity with ongoing appellate issues affecting PTAB practice is a plus. Must be willing to work within a team, work well independently, and enjoy writing and editing. Journal and filing experience is a plus. Strong preference for candidates located in the Washington, DC area; remote officing is possible. Diversity is prized in our team and among our candidates. Please be prepared to discuss the administrative matters you have been involved in and be ready to provide examples.

Click HERE to review other duties and requirements. Apply TODAY!

IPO hosts "IP Litigation Finance & Disclosure" Webinar, September 21

Join Unified’s GC, Jonathan Stroud, and others on Thursday, September 21st, on IPO’s IP Chat Channel. Litigation funding and prevailing secondaries markets have quickly come to undergird huge swaths of U.S. civil litigation today. This is particularly true in U.S. patent litigation, although financing efforts surrounding patents are not exclusively limited to enforcement efforts. Indeed, studies show that up to a third of all modern patent litigation is now funded, making patent litigation the highest-growth area in litigation funding. Some argue that litigation funding has enabled small players and individual inventors to realize the value of their intellectual property holdings. Others have raised concerns about the impact of funding on litigation, pointing especially to a lack of transparency in litigation financing. This webinar will explore this burgeoning field from a variety of angles, including objective facts relating to funders and their cases, insurance and lending efforts, as well as perspectives of investors, defendants, and other market participants. Bringing together these diverse perspectives will help attendees better understand this significant new development in patent litigation and IP monetization.

https://www.unifiedpatents.com/edge

EVENT INFORMATION

Thursday, September 21, 2023

12:00pm-1:00pm ET

Registration Fees

IPO Members: Free - Non-Members: $150

Unified is Hiring: New full-time Senior Patent Counsel position

Senior Patent Counsel - Click HERE to apply

Unified is again growing its legal department and seeks to add another experienced, registered patent attorney to the team to prosecute and litigate matters in-house. Pay is competitive and counsel will have flexible hours and may work remotely. Ideal applicants should be historically underrepresented in the patent field, and should generally have at least five years of firm or other relevant experience practicing before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) working on post-grant petitions (IPR, PGR, and CBM), reexaminations, or other administrative drafting and litigation experience. Deposition and oral hearing experience are preferred.

Applicants should have a strong technical background and be willing to explore diverse new technologies; experience with video codecs, coding, cryptography, compression, signals, wireless communications, or other algorithmic subject matter is a plus. Patent examination experience is a plus; a registration number is a plus; clerking experience is a plus; familiarity with ongoing appellate issues affecting PTAB practice is a plus.

Track LIEs (Litigation … ) in Unified’s Portal

As part of ongoing deterrence activities, Unified’s Portal is introducing the most comprehensive tracker of Litigation Investment Entities (LIEs). Tracking and reporting will be conducted on at least a quarterly basis and will attempt to shed light on this growing but nonetheless little-understood part of the patent litigation landscape. 

The LIEs tracker will consist of two components - a field for NPE Aggregator or NPE parent company of multiple NPEs, and the second is an option if a case is backed by a secured interest or by third-party financing. 

Users can use the plaintiff specific filters to search for entities such as IP Edge or Acacia. Using the Third Party Financing filter, a list of cases will be generated where a secured interest or known third party has an investment into a patent that has been litigated.

In addition to being able to search for NPE Aggregators and Third Party Financing Commitments, the case deal page will provide flags to understand if an entity is part of NPE Aggregator and Financed, such as Ridgeview IP LLC.

Also in the tracker, users can understand the true impact of LIEs and NPE Aggregators by using the Annual Report Tool for a graphical point of view. 

Click HERE for more information on the methodology and to read through Unified’s first LIEs Report. To view the LIEs Tracker in Portal, please click here.

Wi-Fi SEP Zone launched by Unified

Unified Patents is happy to announce a new zone to deter patent abuse in the Standard Essential Patent (SEP) space through its newly launched Wi-Fi 6 Zone. This new Zone brings together a fast-growing network of members to address asymmetries in licensing Wi-Fi 6 standard essential patents and creates a fair and transparent patent licensing process around core patents supporting the next wave of consumer technology growth.

The current Wi-Fi patent landscape is complicated, to say the least. Sisvel’s launched Wi-Fi 6 pool, composed mostly of Huawei patents, constitutes less than 14% of the SEPs needed based on our OPAL Landscape tool at the time of posting.  Also, implementing Wi-Fi 6 requires licenses to Wi-Fi 1-5. However, only one common licensor exists between Sisvel’s Wi-Fi 1-5 and Wi-Fi 6 pools - Philips.

According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wi-Fi 6 will represent almost $265B, or nearly one-third, of Wi-Fi-Enabled GDP by 2025. Given these economic implications and the ubiquitous nature of Wi-Fi in our everyday lives, members need the tools and data necessary to negotiate FRAND licenses in good faith.

Zone members get access to Unified’s tools – the Wi-Fi landscaping (OPAL) tool and the standard submission (OPEN) tool. Unified has also commissioned an economic report (OVAL) to determine FRAND for Wi-Fi 6, due out Q2 2023.

Unified’s OPAL tool objectively scores the statistical essentiality of patent publications to Wi-Fi 6 functionality. Experts manually evaluated over three thousand patent families to create the AI training set and scored them all for statistical essentiality. Full-text search is available via patent, application number, family ID, filing date, etc.

Unified’s OPEN tool provides an indexed and full-text searchable repository of all 122,000 IEEE Wi-Fi submissions, including the 7000+ technical submissions to the Wi-Fi 6 working group.

Finally, Unified’s OVAL tool is a commissioned economic report to determine a Wi-Fi 6 FRAND. Using Innovatio, similar cases, and the likely changes in Wi-Fi 6 chip prices, the economic report will determine the incremental value of new Wi-Fi 6 applications and products. 

Unified Patents’ SEP Wi-Fi 6 zone provides members with the tools and data necessary for impactful FRAND negotiations and to deter invalid or unessential assertions.