Canadian Lawyer InHouse

31 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE JULY 2017 I n the 2011 biographical movie about Oakland Athletics' general manager Billy Beane's efforts to assemble a winning team from a small budget, Brad Pitt starred as the guy who em - ployed the assistance of a number-crunch- ing economist to use data and analytics to put together a competitive team despite having less money than most other major league teams — about one third that of the New York Yankees. The movie was based on Michael Lew - is's best-selling book: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which has since been applied to various professions to show how if you take data already available to you and apply it strategically, you can produce better results without spending more. But can that same theory be applied to managing the complexity and perceived uncertainty of managing in-house patent departments? Apparently, yes. During a session at the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium annual conference in Las Ve - gas in May, David Ishimaru, senior director of patent asset development at Yahoo, Inc. presented on the subject of "Moneyball Pat- ent Asset Management." Ishimaru says the Moneyball approach is "synonymous with the intelligent use of data." Ishimaru wanted to see how he could ap - ply Moneyball methodology to patent man- agement on a day-to-day basis. In 12 years, Ishimaru has helped build and manage the company's global patent portfolio from the ground up. He has de - DATA'S PAYOFF IN THE PATENT DEPARTMENT veloped and implemented many of the de- partment's processes, vendor management, financial modeling and patent analytics capabilities. He's also involved in the com- pany's open-source, standards-setting and patent-monetization efforts. He grew up in Silicon Valley surrounded by technology and companies innovating first with computers and then eventually the World Wide Web. He talked about how his internships in law firms revealed that work wasn't being handled smartly. An electrical engineer and Stanford grad, he came from a background where technology played a role in many aspects of work only to enter the legal field where the idea of high tech was using Microsoft Excel. The patent group at Yahoo hadn't been formed yet when Ishimaru joined it in 2004. "I was very frustrated by the fact there was very little technology being brought to bear," he said. But over the years, one of the ideas he has come to embrace at the patent group is "if you can't measure it, you can't improve it." How Yahoo's patent asset team used Moneyball strategy to get a handle on spending and activity in its legal department. BY JENNIFER BROWN

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