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The founders of three-year-oldChicago-based Global IP LawGroup have profited from awell-timed bet that the marketfor buying and selling patentshas finally come of age.ortel Corp.’s historic $4.5 billion patent portfolio auctionin January 2011 was heralded as a tipping point forpatents and how corporations value them. A few monthsafter Google lost in the Nortel auction, they boughtMotorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. The purchaseincluded 20,000 patents. The deals were followed byMicrosoft’s acquisition of more than 800 AOL patentsreportedly worth more than $1 billion.The corporate appetite for patents has increasedexponentially in the last few years. Bloomberg BusinessWeek recently reported that while the volume oftraditional mergers and acquisitions is down 24 percentthis year, patent deals have skyrocketed in the sameperiod, to $18.8 billion from $450 million from the yearbefore. The trend is reflected in how some companiesstructure their executive ranks: In July, Amazonannounced it was looking for an “Acquisition andInvestment Leader” who would advise the company instrategic patent purchases.While the patent acquisition trend is changing theway corporations look at intellectual property assets,the trend has also helped transform the once staidpractice of patent law and is creating a new generationof entrepreneurial IP legal professionals. In recent years,some top intellectual property lawyers have left their biglaw firms and corporations to set up their own IP shopsto more creatively monetize assets for themselves andtheir clients. Some of these firms are playing pivotal rolesin many of these big-ticket patent deals.One law firm in particular, Global IP Law Group, hasbeen at the center of many high-profile patent acquisitions,including Nortel. Founded by veteran patent litigatorDavid Berten and Steven Steger, a longtime in-house IPcounsel for various technology companies, Global IP LawGroup began in 2009 in downtown Chicago. Today, thefirm has grown from two lawyers to a dozen, operatingglobally with affiliate lawyers in nine countries.According to several reports, Global IP played a crucialrole in the outcome of the Nortel patent auction. IntellectualAsset Management magazine noted that “without the earlyand detailed input of specialist IP advisers, the Nortelauction may not ever have happened, let alone raised theamount that it did.” The article also attributed the successof the auction to Global IP’s ability to demonstrate thepotential value of the portfolio to “non-IP parties” andpersuade those C-level executives who know very littleabout patents to spend billions of dollars on them.Starting Out on His OwnFour years ago, Berten was a traditional patent litigator.He began his career as an associate in 1989 at Kirkland& Ellis, where he worked under the tutelage of famedChicago trial lawyers Fred Bartlit and Philip Beck. As ayoung litigator, Berten did mostly commercial litigationL A W D R A G O N 26 I s s u e 13Photo by: Anthony Tahlier