AOP's Monica Winghart Interviewed in the Daily Journal
Posted on Mon, Dec 19, 2011
The Daily Journal, California’s largest legal news provider, recently published an interview with Article One General Counsel Monica Winghart. Monica is the newest member of the AOP team and her hiring highlights Article One’s expansion to the west coast. Prior to joining Article One, Monica spent seven years as Chief of Intellectual Property Litigation at The Clorox Company in Oakland, California.
In the interview, Monica spoke about crowdsourcing, Article One’s Reward model, and the new Litigation Avoidance product. She also elaborated on her role at Article One and the company’s unique approach to tackling the financial risks brought on by patent suits.
Speaking about how crowdsourcing improves prior art research, Monica said that “if two heads are better than one, then three heads are better than two, and four heads are better than three.” She elaborated on her own experience with prior art search, saying “in the past, in private practice, we spent months and months tracking down data to try to find that golden nugget which was that pre-eminent prior art. By using this crowd approach… we are able to find that same critical art within days on a very limited, fixed budget.”
Litigation Avoidance
Regarding the Litigation Avoidance program, Monica explained that her role is “multi-fold” in implementing the product. She helps to “figure out the best way to handle litigation avoidance as a product in terms of the scope of what we're doing, timing in which we're doing it, the cost structure in which it's taking place, and the tools a typical client might employ, in terms of reexaminations or declaratory judgment actions or [other] litigation tactics.” Summing up the service, she stated: “We give [our clients] facts to help them make better decisions.”
On the subject of non-practicing entities (NPEs), the patent-holding companies that are often accused of having problematic litigation policies, Monica acknowledged that there are no strict definitions. She said that “it's almost like the duck. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and is yellow, it's probably a duck. That's the NPE.” “It's a holdup.” She said of NPE activity. “They say, ‘Pay me a million dollars or I'm going to make you spend three [million] to make it go away.’ That's the problem.”
The full article is available by subscription online at the Daily Journal.