IP becomes big business for law firms: even the most general practices get involved.

Used to be the term intellectual property conjured up a science nerd with a law degree holed up in a cubicle trying to determine whether an invention was, indeed, original.

But in a digital age when information is currency and entire businesses can tuna on a name or an idea, IP has gone mainstream.

Nearly any lawyer involved in nearly any business now must have some IP expertise, and those who specialize in the practice can be found at just about any general practice law firm.

"It's gotten huge over the last 10 years, and it's not just the Internet," said Jason L. Hoffman, a partner at Nemecek & Cole in Sherman Oaks. "Certainly, the Internet has broadened intellectual properties and disputes and made intellectual property a forefront issue with everyone involved in litigation in general. And if you're a transactional lawyer, you certainly have to be concerned with defining intellectual property with any agreement or sale."

In a knowledge based economy, it is intellectual assets that are most valuable. But it isn't just the big headline-grabbing cases like Napster or the raids on counterfeit designer labels. With consumers and businesses using the Internet to locate goods and services, trade-marking a name has taken on far greater significance. And in a business environment where even top-level executives more freely from one company to the next, safeguarding trade secrets has become critical for even the most low-tech of companies.

Meanwhile, the acceleration of technological innovation has escalated the rush of patent applications. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, total patent applications rose almost 79 percent between 1990 and 2000 and 33 percent between 2000 and 2005 to 417,508 last year.

Patent applications, once heavily weighted in the electronics and science fields, have been more recently fueled by the emergence of the biotech and software industries.

"The legal industry is a service industry and the question, is what services do our clients want?" said Susan Barbieri Montgomery, chair, American Bar Association section of intellectual property law. "There are a number of important industries, biotech, software, entertainment, that are very dependent on intellectual property assets."

What began as a highly specialized practice dealing with patent registrations and protections has evolved into a specialty that covers everything from the relatively simple trade-marking of names to the complex strategies behind licensing intellectual properties for a host of uses, many of which cannot easily be anticipated.

Just ask the music industry, which never saw the potential effect of the Internet on the distribution of music.

"When you structured a licensing agreement, you knew what the future use would be," said Brett Garner, senior associate with Michelman & Robinson. "Nowadays, you can have a new media format a year from now, and if you don't capture that in the licensing agreement, the client can lose out."

The emergence of the digital age, with its variety of new media from the Internet to movies played over cell phones has led to a second branch of intellectual property practice, differentiated as soft IP versus hard IP.

"Hard IP tends to be more patent focused," said Steve Sereboff, a partner at SoCal IP Law Group in Westlake Village. "Soft IP is more like entertainment law. You get a lot of IP attorneys who are really deal guys but because their expertise is dealing with IP transactions, license deals, production deals, they think of themselves as IP attorneys."

Patent law still represents a huge practice. Very large companies like IBM, which holds more than 3,000 patents and earns more than $1 billion licensing and selling them, according to published reports, and others are driving not just a business in patent transactions, but a rethinking of patent law to better facilitate the collaboration brought about by globalization, the Internet and other business dynamics.

Softer growth

But it is the softer applications of intellectual property law that have been the key to the growth at general practice firms that has occurred more recently.

"A lot of the reason IP has become more important is based on the valuation of intellectual property," said Garner. "Businesses get a worth from their IP. They can finance off of it. There are some companies whose names are worth more than their actual book value."

Michelman & Robinson's IP practice has more than doubled from a two-attorney operation in 2001.

SoCal IP, which works mostly with technology and emerging growth companies, launched as a solo practice somewhat more than four years ago and now employs five patent attorneys plus a patent agent.

And Greenberg & Bass in Encino has just added two new attorneys to its IP practice.

The Internet has placed added emphasis on intellectual property for even the smallest of companies.

"If you want to find a restaurant, the first place you're going to go is the Internet," said Mishawn Nolan, partner, entertainment, intellectual property and new media practice at Greenberg & Bass. "If you haven't protected your trademark, and there's a bunch of other people with a similar name, that customer is not going to find you."

Using the Internet

Happily for them, the rise of the Internet has also afforded inexpensive ways for small companies to protect their names, offering relatively low-cost trademark watch services.

But other IP services such as work involving trade secrets and work related to the entertainment industry, has become particularly complex.

Trade secrets, involving anything from an employee who resigns taking along a rolodex of client contacts to the classic case over the employee who went to a rival firm taking the recipe for the famous "nooks and crannies" in Thomas' English Muffins, can be far more complex requiring litigation that runs into the millions of dollars.

But most of what takes the time of IP attorneys these days is entertainment law, with its myriad of criss-crossing deals over licensing images and products and the divvying up of intellectual assets among those involved in productions.

"When I was in law school in the mid-1990s, entertainment law and intellectual property were two separate areas," said Nolan. "It's almost impossible to have an entertainment or IP practice where the two don't overlap anymore."

BY SHELLY GARCIA

Senior Reporter