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Comment by rollypolly | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondering how large companies buy and sell patents in bulk like that. Do they just point at a filing cabinet and say, there's 650 patents in there, it's yours for 550M$, take it or leave it. Or do they have an army of lawyers pour over them one by one?

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No need for an army of lawyers. Most patent shops, either NPEs (ie, trolls) or large corporations big patent warchests will use legal case management software, eDiscovery systems, and patent ownership/submission tracking software.

In short, patents, like people, offices and other "assets" are managed using enterprise software.

I would assume that it's pretty easy for a company to take a set of claims/wording (ie, patents asserted in Yahoo's suit) and search using their systems against a corpus of both internal (patents, etc) and external sources (case findings and news - ie, like Lexis Nexus) the best fits to meet a given "need" - either the company is being sued, filing suit, or in this case, helping an ally/customer (note: Microsoft also owns an not-insignificant chunk of Facebook).

It's a bit of both. I don't work in legal but I see them going at it from time to time when patent stuff comes up. There is definitely 'the filing cabinet' (more like a room) and it contains one of several copies of the important documents - but the lawyers are the interface to those documents.

Sometimes I can't help but feel that most lawyers do not much more than present an obfuscation layer around standard forms.

  Sometimes I can't help but feel that most lawyers do not
  much more than present an obfuscation layer around
  standard forms.

I bet non-technical people also have that feeling about engineers.

"It took you a second to change the behavior of this. You're obviously not working very hard." ..when in reality, it took a lot of effort to make a system flexible enough to adapt its behavior quickly to changes in requirements.

...but I'm getting off topic now. :)

No, it's a great point, and one well taken.

Great point, my lawyer has saved me much more than she costs because she alerts me to things I had no idea I was even doing incorrectly. Things like an audit waiver so I don't have to pay an auditor to audit my own companies' finances.

Its not about how much a lawyer costs, its about how much they make you.

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