Reducing costs increasing efficiencies during a major acquisition

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) create many challenges beyond the day-to-day patent prosecution activities of a busy corporate IP department. Following Millipore’s acquisition by German pharmaceutical giant Merck in 2010, the company’s IP department had to complete three large-scale merger-related tasks: 1. Assimilate more than 2,600 Millipore patents into its new parent company’s IP portfolio; 2. Accurately and correctly record IP ownership changes at the respective PTO offices around the world; 3. Migrate the Millipore portfolio to Merck’s Memotech IP Management system in order to further harmonize the IP department processes between the two companies. While performing this layer of additional acquisition-driven tasks, it was business as usual prosecuting patent applications for Millipore’s busy internal IP department.