Among the educational resources offered by the Society are the Mission:Intangible® Monthly Briefings. These one hour events comprise about 45 minutes of prepared remarks backed up by presentation materials, and about 15 minutes of responses to questions submitted by listeners. Often, because of time constraints, there are questions leftover.

The 8 January 2010 Mission: Intangible Monthly Briefing comprising a robust panel of Society committee chairs evoked many questions. As promised, here are some of the leftovers.

QUESTION TO CATHY REESE: Your comments about the concept of director's duty of oversight driving greater attention to intangibles management are intriguing. Must a new area like this be built case by case or can there be a catalyst that speeds up the process (such a new set of laws and/or regulations). Is this reasonable to expect in the space of the next ten years?

ANSWER: Directors and officers currently have an affirmative duty under Delaware fiduciary law to oversee and monitor corporate assets and liabilities. Delaware's highest court has said that directors and officers can be held personally liable for losses suffered by the corporation as a result of their inattention. That court has also said that directors violate this duty by failing to (i) implement "reporting and information systems and controls" designed to ferret out such risks and report them on a timely basis to the board, or (ii) failing to monitor and update such systems and controls and thus ignore red flags that can lead to corporate liability. The losses engendered by one patent infringement suit can be enormous, particularly in a wilful infringement suit where damages may be trebled because the company "wilfully" continued to infringe when it knew or should have known of the infringement. I believe that the catalyst that will speed up the process and lead to nationwide awareness that this body of law applies to IP or IA risks and losses, would be one shareholder suit against corporate directors seeking to recover from them personally these infringement damages. Another route might be a shareholder suit to recover market losses for director and officer failure to monitor or address reputational risks before they damaged the value of the company. Shareholder actions for breaches of fiduciary duties by director and officers that are filed in the Delaware Chancery Court receive nationwide attention from corporate lawyers and the boards that they advise and can lead to instant changes in board focus.

Cathy L. Reese, Esq.
Fish & Richardson P.C.

QUESTION TO MARK LUCIER: In your presentation, you made reference to “IA-based financial products and investment vehicles.” How do we position these products so as to avoid being tainted by the recent financial derivatives debacle?

ANSWER: When I was talking about financial products and investment vehicles, what I was referring to was inventing new ways to "ring fence" intangible assets and the risks associated with them, thereby enabling investors to own or finance those assets or bear those risks. The creativity and complexity, then, is more about how we isolate the assets and risk than in how we slice, dice and allocate cash flows among various classes of investors.....think of it more as creating an intangible asset tracking stock or risk-linked security than as engineering a multi-tranche royalty-based CDO or securitization. Alternatively, to the extent we're able to quantify value & risk associated with intangibles, and further, if we can somehow link that to more traditional measures of financial or equity value and risk, then that could serve as the basis for a financial product that enables a company or its outside investors to share in the value being created by the company's intangibles or to hedge against the risk associated with those intangibles.

Of course, your point is well taken that regulators and the general public are skeptical of (read: hostile toward) anything that requires more than one or two boxes and arrows to describe its structure. A financial product's purpose should be plainly evident to those on Main Street and not just to those of us on Wall Street. If we are to be successful in creating these instruments and having them be broadly accepted, our driving motivation needs to be a focus on creating something that funnels capital to intangible assets to support and encourage innovation, rather than on cleverly shuffling the capital structure deck and obfuscating the instrument's true purpose. If we approach the creation of new financial products from that perspective, then "positioning" what we've created will simply be about highlighting the substantive economic benefits, rather than hiding something from the regulators or the Wall Street Journal.

Marc Lucier
Deutsche Bank