Are Your Patents Excellent — Or Just Expensive?
Your board will eventually ask a question your patent portfolio cannot answer: what did we actually buy, and can anyone in this room defend it as a business decision?
Not an enforcement question. Not a legal question. A capital allocation question.[1] Did this company spend its patent budget building strategic leverage — or did it spend years buying process, comfort, and invoices while telling itself that was the same thing?
That is the question most CEOs avoid. And the answer, in most companies, is not good.
The machine runs whether or not anyone is steering it
A company can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on patent filings, office action responses, continuations, foreign filings, and portfolio reviews. The law firm can be reputable. The patents can be professionally drafted. The board can see a growing patent count on a slide.
None of that answers whether the company built something strategically valuable or simply bought a lot of legal work.
The patent system rewards activity.[2] An invention disclosure meeting happened. A filing was submitted. An office action response was prepared. A continuation was discussed. Everybody feels like something important happened.
But nobody stopped to ask: what exactly are we trying to accomplish, and does this patent help us do that?
That question gets skipped because nobody wants to own the answer. The inventor wants credit. The attorney wants to prosecute the case. The CTO wants to show innovation output.[3] The CEO does not want to be the one who stops the thing that might matter later. So the machine keeps running — more patents, more spend, more administrative effort, and very little business judgment.
The CEO is funding blind
This is the part nobody says out loud.
The CEO approves the budget, defends the strategy, and signs off on the spend. But the CEO often cannot independently tell whether the patent work is excellent or simply polished, credible-sounding, and expensive.[4]
That is not a minor issue. That is the whole problem.
When investors ask about the moat, the CEO gives the polished version. When the board asks about the portfolio, the CEO gives the clean narrative. When the patent attorney presents options, the CEO approves the next step.
But underneath all of that is a much simpler thought: I hope this is good.
That is not strategy. That is crossed fingers with invoices attached.
A lot of CEOs assume that hiring a reputable patent firm solves this. It does not.[5] A law firm can draft claims, prosecute applications, and manage deadlines. That is valuable. But the law firm does not allocate capital across competing priorities, does not own the revenue model, and does not live with the consequences when the story falls apart in diligence.
Legal execution is not business judgment. If nobody owns that distinction, the company does not have a patent strategy. It has a patent vendor.
What happens when nobody is steering
The spending continues — not out of conviction, but because stopping feels dangerous. The CEO pictures a competitor emerging and a board member asking why the company did nothing. So the budget survives another year.
That is how weak portfolios stay alive. Nobody is confident enough to call the spend strategic, but nobody feels safe enough to shut it down.
And the damage goes deeper than wasted money.
Good inventions get buried next to mediocre ones because nobody filters at intake.[6] Outside counsel starts driving filing decisions by default because nobody inside the company defined priorities. Management gets comfortable repeating a story it cannot actually defend. The board sees activity and assumes there is strategy behind it. Investors hear “patent portfolio” and assume someone is steering.
Meanwhile, the company is accumulating paper instead of leverage.
The CEO cannot explain the moat without hand-waving. The portfolio cannot survive hard questions in diligence. And the confidence that comes from seeing a growing patent count turns out to be the most expensive form of comfort a company can buy.
The difference between expensive and excellent
An expensive portfolio proves the company spent money. Invoices, filings, patent numbers on a spreadsheet. That is a shoebox full of receipts, not a strategy.
An excellent portfolio proves the company made decisions.
Management can point to a filing and say: we funded this because it blocks a specific competitor from solving a specific problem in a way that matters to our revenue.[7] We did not fund that one because it protects our implementation, not the bottleneck — and a competitor would design around it in six months.
Weak ideas got filtered out early — before the company spent $50,000 discovering it should have said no at intake. Strong ideas got pursued for a reason that connects to the business, not because filing felt prudent.
The CEO can explain the logic to a board member in plain English. Not because the CEO memorized patent jargon, but because the decisions were made on business terms in the first place.
That is the contrast. Expensive is motion. Excellent is judgment. One fills a spreadsheet. The other survives a boardroom.
The gap
Most CEOs are not asking for more patent analysis. They are not asking for another portfolio review or a longer options memo from outside counsel.
They are asking — privately, and usually without saying it — for a way to stop funding a system they cannot confidently judge.
That is the gap. Not a gap in legal execution. Not a gap in attorney effort. A gap in management.
Someone has to own the decisions that the patent system is designed to avoid: what deserves funding, what does not, what aligns with the business, what is just habit, and where the company is building real leverage instead of accumulating legal artifacts.
Until somebody owns that job, the company will keep mistaking spend for strategy. And that “I hope this is good” will keep sitting underneath every board presentation, every investor conversation, and every invoice the CEO signs.
That is not a sustainable way to manage a business asset. And for a lot of companies, it has gone on long enough.
1 Why Patent Competence Is a Board-Level Responsibility ↩
2 Your Patent Attorney Makes More Money When the Patent Application Is Bad ↩
3 Your CTO Should Never Own Your Patent Strategy ↩
4 Your Inventor Loves Your Patent Attorney. That Is the Problem. ↩
5 The Highest Quality Patent Work at the Lowest Cost ↩
6 The Invention Disclosure Meeting Is Where Patent Value Is Decided ↩
7 Stop Patenting Your Invention. Start Patenting Your Competitor’s Product. ↩