What Was at Stake
NovaSemi Technologies, a pre-revenue semiconductor startup with breakthrough memory architecture, needed a global patent portfolio built rapidly before entering licensing negotiations with major chipmakers. Within six months of initial filings, a competitor filed IPR petitions against 9 of the earliest applications, threatening to invalidate the core of the portfolio before it could generate revenue.
How We Approached It
Marcus O'Sullivan deployed a prosecution-first strategy, filing provisional applications across 14 jurisdictions simultaneously to establish priority dates globally. He restructured claim hierarchies across all applications to create multiple independent fallback positions resistant to IPR attack. When the IPR petitions arrived, Blackstone's responses leveraged a proprietary claim mapping methodology that reframed every cited prior art reference as non-anticipatory.
What We Achieved
All 9 IPR petitions were denied institution by the PTAB. The 47-patent portfolio across 14 jurisdictions was fully secured within 8 months. NovaSemi's first licensing agreement, negotiated using the portfolio as leverage, generated $12M in upfront royalties — before the company shipped a single chip.