An Interview with Louis Foreman

• Author: Eli Mazour
• Position: Eli Mazour is the host of Clause8.tv and an associate with Harrity & Harrity LLP in Fairfax, Virginia. He can be reached at emazour@harrityllp.com.
• Pages: 7-8

Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 11, Number 1, a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2018 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

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PROFILES IN IP LAW

An Interview with Louis Foreman

Founder and Chief Executive of Enventys

By Eli Mazour

Eli Mazour is the host of Clause8.tv and an associate with Harrity

& Harrity LLP in Fairfax, Virginia. He can be reached at emazour@

harrityllp.com.

The last decade in the patent law eld has been dened by

“patent troll” alarmism; major judicial, legislative, and regu-

latory efforts to limit patent rights in response; and increased

corporate budgetary pressures to justify and lower IP-related

legal expenses. The general mood of IP conferences and pub-

lications has understandably reected these developments.

However, Louis Foreman—the immediate past president of the

Intellectual Property Owners (IPO) Education Foundation—

has been a refreshing contrast. He has taken the long-term

view and remained focused on the benets of America’s pat-

ent system. He is currently the CEO of Enventys and Edison

Nation, which help turn innovations into consumer products.

How did a nice, nonlawyer, nonengineer like you join the

board of the IPO Education Foundation?

My rst interaction with IPO was actually with a few other

IPO board members while I was a member of the Patent Pub-

lic Advisory Committee (PPAC). I rst became aware of IPO

and the Education Foundation through guys like Steve Miller,

from Procter & Gamble, and then they had asked if I would

be interested in serving on the Education Foundation.

I have now been a board member of the Education Foun-

dation for about seven years. I enjoy not only the interaction

with the other board members, but more importantly the

mission of the Education Foundation to educate and inspire

people not only to be innovative but also to see value in intel-

lectual property. I’ve also been on the IPO board for the same

amount of time, and I believe I’m the only nonattorney on the

board. IPO has one board position where they want an inven-

tor to be on the board, so this way they can bring a different

perspective to the board. And so, for the last six or seven

years that’s the role that I played.

Any insights about IP lawyers that you have learned over

the years?

Although we have different backgrounds and certainly a dif-

ferent educational path to our careers, I think at the end of the

day we have the same goals, and that is a strong intellectual

property system. And so, what I’ve learned from the profes-

sionals whom I’ve worked with over the years is that they all

share a common belief that the patent system is important, that

having certainty and predictability to an IP system is important

for the companies that they work for. As an innovator myself

with multiple patents, obviously I need to make sure that

there’s value in the intellectual property that we get because

that’s how we monetize the inventions that we develop.

From your viewpoint as an innovator and entrepreneur, how

do strong patent rights practically help promote innovation?

I’ve been an entrepreneur since college. So, for 30 years

plus I’ve been starting businesses. But when you start a busi-

ness if you’re an entrepreneur or an inventor, it’s all about

managing a relationship between risk and reward. There’s

obviously a huge amount of risk and uncertainty in starting a

company or developing a product. But the reward, the ability

to get a patent to be able to monetize that idea through a patent

and through licensing or bringing the product to market, is the

reason why entrepreneurs and inventors are willing to assume

that risk. With a strong patent system, there’s greater certainty

that a patent is going to issue and then that patent is going to

kind of stand the test of time, and give you the ability to get

the value that you need to justify the risk that you’re assum-

ing. When the patent system is tested and challenged and when

there’s uncertainty as to the validity of a patent, that’s what

messes up the formula. Because if, all of a sudden, the like-

lihood of success is decreased, then there’s less incentive for

entrepreneurs or inventors to go out and innovate to begin with.

How have innovators and entrepreneurs been impacted by

developments in patent law over the last decade?

The high invalidation rate that’s occurring at the Pat-

ent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) is denitely having an

impact on small innovators because they’re starting to ques-

tion whether or not the prize was really worth the efforts.

When you see inventors’ patents invalidated at some point

after issuance, infringers using inter partes reviews as a way

either to game the system or to force inventors into licenses,

or in some cases to kind of willfully infringe on their pat-

ents, that has a chilling effect on whether or not inventors

are going to innovate. If there’s no reward for the risk, then

there’s no incentive for starting the journey in the rst place.

The patent or patent portfolio has always been what lev-

els the playing eld. It gives the solo entrepreneur or inventor

the ability to compete with the biggest companies in the mar-

ketplace—because the ability to prevent others from making

use of or selling what they’ve created gives them that license,

that ability to go into a marketplace where there may be a

more established player, a more recognized brand, but that

patent gives them ability. And, same thing from a licensing