Website sorts, stores patent-related information

Intellectual property law firm Lee & Hayes unveiled a subscription website Thursday to offer detailed analyses of patent areas, company patent strategies and evaluations of patents as business assets.

Called IP Street, the site is targeted to business executives, inventors, investors, IP attorneys and technology transfer companies.

IP Street CEO Lewis Lee said the goal is to make IP Street the intellectual property equivalent of Morningstar, the online leader in evaluations of stock market funds.

Lee & Hayes has its main office in downtown Spokane. IP Street, with nine employees, will be based in Spokane and Seattle.

Forty years ago about 70 percent of the capitalization value of the leading publicly traded companies was tied to equipment and other tangible items. Today, “80 to 90 percent of the value is in intangibles, and the largest chunk of that is IP assets,” Lee said.

All the information the website will offer is publicly available, but much of it is hard to find or can be buried in jargon and legalese, Lee said. IP Street’s goal is to discover, sort, analyze and organize relevant information and then present it cleanly and coherently, he said.

Customers can also upload their patent information and obtain a portfolio analysis. All uploaded information that is private will remain protected.

“A likely customer scenario would also involve asking (IP Street) to do a portfolio analysis of a competitor’s IP portfolio,” Lee said.

Lee & Hayes has spent about a year preparing the technology that runs the site.

Lee said all data will be stored and protected in a secure, private cloud service.

Paid access to information will be available through daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly plans.