I walked into my first IPWatchdog's Women's IP Forum last week expecting some really informative panels and solid networking opportunities. Like all conferences, I was planning to follow my usual routine: take notes on the latest hot topics in IP and then write a blog post about what I’d learned.
While I did walk out with a notebook full of policy takeaways, I also left with many new friends and a feeling I haven't had at a conference in a long time: a kind of camaraderie that I think is really rare.
Let me start with the obvious. The talent in that room was staggering.
Sherry Knowles opened day one with lessons from a 40-year career in IP, and she set the tone for the whole week: direct, generous, and completely unafraid to tell us what she thinks and what she’s experienced. She moved everyone with her story of battling breast cancer while also litigating a high profile case in the UK, during which she was undergoing chemotherapy and losing her hair right there in the court room. She noted that, sometimes when things get really hard, you just have to laugh. Finding the humor amidst the craziness is really important for staying sane.
Coke Morgan Stewart, former Acting Director and Deputy Director of the USPTO and now President and CEO of the Council for Innovation Promotion, sat down for a fireside chat that I'm still turning over in my head. Coke described walking into the USPTO in 2021 and finding a ghost town. The agency had gone fully remote, shed two of its six main buildings, and was facing a patent backlog in the middle of a hiring freeze. She led what she called a hard reset on returning to the office, which, as anyone who has led a team through that kind of change knows, is not a popularity contest.
One thing she said stuck with me more than any policy point: if a decision was right for the patent system and the agency but unpopular, she tried not to waste a lot of emotional energy on it.
I wrote that down and underlined it twice. How much emotional energy do we expend unnecessarily, especially when we have to make tough or unpopular choices?
I said earlier in this post that I came for the content but left with something much deeper. That being said, the panels WERE very informative. I learned a lot especially from the pharma panel, which laid out how fragile the balance is between rewarding innovation and enabling competition. Drug development takes 10 to 15 years and a huge monetary investment, with a high failure rate, and frameworks like Hatch Waxman exist to make that math work. The speakers walked through how the Inflation Reduction Act, Most Favored Nation pricing, the ETHIC Act, and MAPIA each chip away at effective patent life or add new compliance risk. One panelist pointed to what's been dubbed the "pill penalty," where small molecule drugs hit Medicare negotiation years earlier than biologics, which changes where investors put their money.
The global panel was a reminder that IP doesn't stop at the border. Brazil's preliminary injunction process makes it a critical market, and Customs and Border Protection is now using AI to flag whether a supplier could realistically produce the volume of goods it claims, while cracking down on counterfeit medicines and weight loss drugs.
The licensing economics panel framed it all with one stat: roughly 90% of the assets reported by S&P 500 companies are intangible. Patents are an enormous piece of that.
And Coke's closing message was blunt. The patent system is in crisis, patent owners can't rely on the rights being issued, and the same patent can face three simultaneous challenges. She pushed back on the idea that patents challenged at the PTAB are "bad patents," noting that about 80% of those challenges had parallel district court cases. Her conclusion: Congress is the only place this gets fixed, and people outside government need to walk the halls and make the case – which she is doing.
Here's what really got me, though.
Between sessions, over coffee, at dinner, the conversations kept drifting to the same place. Not Reexams. Not PERA. But the attempt for balance.
These women are carrying enormous professional weight. Their decisions move billion dollar portfolios, shape federal policy, and determine whether a drug reaches patients. And so many of them are doing it while raising kids, supporting aging parents, or both (the “sandwich generation”).
I heard about school pickups coordinated from airport gates. Pumping between depositions. Dealing with custody tradeoffs amidst divorce. Bedtime calls squeezed in before a client dinner. Nobody was complaining. They were just being honest about what it takes.
I have two young children. I travel for work. My husband travels about half the time. And we live far from family, so there's no grandparent down the street to call when a flight gets delayed or someone spikes a fever the night before a big meeting.
Some weeks it works beautifully. Some weeks it's held together with too much screen time, a very patient babysitter, and a lot of text messages that say "let’s just make it to Saturday."
What I've learned is that you can't be perfect and balance is a myth. It’s more of a see-saw, where you sometimes have to give more to work, and others to family. But you do need to be deliberate. We plan our travel together in a shared calendar. We protect a few non-negotiables, like bedtime on nights we're home, Friday movie night, and attending school events that are important to the kids. We've also built a village of friends who are in the same boat and help each other.
That's why Coke's line about emotional energy landed so hard for me. When you are stretched between high stakes work and small humans who need you, you cannot afford to spend energy on the things that don't serve you. You make the call, you own it, and you move on to what's next.
I left the Forum more informed about where IP policy is heading. But more than that, I left feeling part of a community.
There's something powerful about looking around a room and realizing that the woman who just explained patent thickets to a hundred people also packed a lunchbox at 6am before her flight. It doesn't make the load lighter, but it makes it feel a lot less lonely.
To Sherry, Coke, the IPWatchdog team, and every woman I laughed with, learned from, and swapped survival tips with last week: thank you. I'll see you next year.