Peer to Peer Magazine

66 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SUMMER 2017 Are You Ready for IP Analytics? MEMBER RESOURCES Are You Ready for IP Analytics? by Robin Hunziker of General Electric Oil & Gas Technology Center and LEDES Oversight Commiee A new buzzword in the legal industry is "analytics." Proponents gush about analytics' ability to provide deep insights. One legal area receiving focus is intellectual property. Perhaps analytics can provide guidance regarding what type of protection is optimal for a particular innovation. But what are "analytics"? SAS, a leader in this arena, defines analytics as "an encompassing and multidimensional field that uses mathematics, statistics, predictive modeling and machine-learning techniques to find meaningful paerns and knowledge in recorded data." Analytics require recorded data — lots of recorded data to train and then test models. The data must be structured, preferably in a standard format. Intellectual property typically arises in corporations and is disclosed to law firms in the form of "invention disclosures." To date, invention disclosure formats are proprietary and oen unstructured. Performing analytics with data in these formats will be challenging at best. In 2015, the LEDES Oversight Commiee adopted an invention disclosure data format standard. The new standard should improve the quality, completeness and interoperability of invention disclosure data. Compliant data should be more amenable to integration with maer management systems, project management soware and dashboards. Venture capitalists and mergers and acquisition experts are eyeing the standard to expedite due diligence. The standard data format should provide a basis for accumulating structured data to facilitate analytics. At least one soware developer reports progress on implementing the ability to generate and read invention disclosures that comply with the new standard. Other soware developers have indicated strong support, but programming resources are limited absent interest expressed by users. If you think this new standard might benefit your employer or clients, please contact your soware provider and ask when they will offer compliant tools. If your current provider has no answer, look for announcements from other providers regarding implementation of the LEDES invention disclosure standard. But don't wait. Given analytics' need for large volumes of data and the time necessary to accumulate sufficient data, delaying implementation could cause problems. P2P For more information, see https://ledes.org/loc-ipmm-invention- disclosure-schema or read "The Benefits of a New XML Invention Disclosure Standard" (State Bar of Texas, IP Section TIPSHEET, Vol. 11 No. 3, 3 Oct 2016). WANT TO LEARN MORE?

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