Patent portfolio management in a broad sense relates to strategic organization, evaluation, and utilization of the patents owned by a company or an individual. The goal is to optimize the economic value of the patent portfolio while minimizing patent-related costs and legal risks. A well-managed patent portfolio aims at protecting technologies, products and services and thereby to block competitors from entering the market with same or similar technologies, products and services. Patent portfolio management also encompasses the systematic monitoring of third-party patents, a licensing strategy (both for licensing-out own patents and licensing-in third-party patents), patent enforcement, and patent portfolio assessments in mergers, acquisition and partnerships.

Patent portfolio management is an inter-disciplinary task, that involves legal, technical and market expertise. Regular patent portfolio reviews should therefore be conducted jointly by the patent owner together with a patent attorney to assess and update the technical and business relevance of the patents:

• The patent attorney provides the legal aspects, such as scope of protection (based on claims before and after grant or after invalidity proceedings), legal status (patent family members, pending application(s), granted patent(s), opposition(s), enforcement, expiries), and cost estimates (for patent prosecution and maintenance per country).
• The patent owner provides the technology-related aspects, such as the status of development of the related technology or product, product modifications, technical trends, and the technical development roadmap.
• The patent owner further provides the market-related aspects, including the desired geographic coverage, technical solutions implemented in competitors’ products, and suspected patent conflicts.

As a result of patent portfolio reviews, informed decisions can be made about maintaining or dropping patents, filing new patent applications, expanding the country coverage (within certain time limits), reducing the country coverage, and thereby shaping the patent portfolio to the actual needs and managing the patent costs.