Intellectual Property in Practice

NOTE: This course is remote.

JD and LLM students may enroll in #6926.

This course examines how intellectual property decisions are made across the lifecycle of a company, with a focus on how those decisions are shaped by resource constraints, timing, and uncertainty. Rather than treating IP as a standalone legal subject, the course considers how IP functions within broader business judgment—affecting what gets built, what is protected, how transactions are structured, and how risk and value are assessed.

Through weekly sessions led by founders, enterprise IP leaders, in-house and outside counsel, transaction advisors, and investors, the course follows a structured arc from company formation and product development through IP ownership, commercialization, transactions, governance, and capital evaluation. Each session focuses on how different actors approach IP decisions based on role, incentives, and accountability, and how the same set of facts can reasonably lead to different outcomes.

The course is designed to develop a practical understanding of how IP operates in real settings. Emphasis is placed on how decisions are made under constraint, how tradeoffs are evaluated, and how intellectual property becomes relevant at specific inflection points in a company’s development.