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Chris W. Higgins, prolific inventor and attorney, is an associate of Invention Arts. An experienced corporate executive, intellectual property attorney and inventor-for-hire, Chris has extensive experience in strategic IP creation, patent harvesting, invention disclosure drafting, patent application editing, and claim strategy oversight. He specializes in expanding patentable subject matter from disparate inventors, overseeing outside patent counsel to ensure timely, high quality drafts, and bringing his diverse technical and international patent claims experience to capture the broadest and most valuable aspects of subject inventions.
With nearly fifteen years of professional experience as an Internet patent attorney and intellectual property executive, Chris's early legal background was a mix of patent transactions and litigation enabling him to understand well the perfection of patent applications into patents and the presentation of patents into exploitable corporate assets. Chris has comprehensive legal experience working with patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, M&A transactions, licensing transactions and technical and patent due diligence.
Most recently, Chris was the head of Yahoo!, Inc.’s global patent department managing a large and growing team of patent professionals and overseeing an eight figure annual budget and operations in over twenty countries. As a strategic intellectual property expert and inventor with the Early Stage Products and Intellectual Property Innovation teams, Chris was a named inventor on well over two hundred pending patent applications. Chris originally joined Yahoo! from its acquisition of Overture, inventors of the patented and now highly licensed paid search family of patents of which Chris was an integral part.
Having managed several major Internet companies' patenting efforts, including negotiating and overseeing large global portfolios of patents and prosecuting attorneys and firms, Chris has highly valuable expertise and experience in the development and management of strategic initiatives for optimizing intellectual asset protection and exploitation. Chris excels in working with teams of inventors through rapid one- and two-day strategic intellectual property development sessions in collaboration with patent drafting counsel to produce high quality, highly-targeted patent disclosures that are then managed over a tight three month process to produce the best possible patent applications for protecting valuable intellectual assets.
Chris received his J.D. from the University of Washington Law School in 1997 where he was the winner of the prestigious Moot Court competition, his M.S., summa cum laude, in 1991 from Florida State University as well as his B.A., magna cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1990.
Chris W. Higgins Specialties
online advertising including commercial search; contextual and display advertising; algorithmic search; online advertising marketplaces; intellectual property strategy and portfolio management; online communications; knowledge representation and management; user data management; media manipulation; portal services technologies.