Most engineering companies have outside counsel. They have patent attorneys helping them file, prosecute, and protect their inventions. What many of them don't have is someone asking the harder questions: Where is this company trying to go, and is the IP strategy actually built to get them there?

The gap between obtaining patent rights and building a strategy around them is at the heart of what Emily Teesdale, Founder of Pivot IP and former Senior Patent Attorney at Airbus and former Head of IP at GKN Aerospace, spends her days trying to close.

"What I'm not trying to do is replace the patent attorneys helping them with their inventions and drafting and prosecuting those patent applications," Teesdale explains in a recent episode of IP Innovators. "What I bring is something quite different to that. That's the strategy side."

It's a distinction that sounds simple. In practice, it's one of the most consequential gaps in IP management—and one that patent attorneys are not trained to see clearly.

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The Three Silos That Slow Everything Down

Teesdale describes IP dysfunction as falling into three distinct silos, each with its own dynamics and its own set of risks.

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1. The Internal Silo

The first is internal: The friction between legal and IP teams, engineering teams, sales, and procurement—all working under the same company banner but pulling in subtly different directions. Legal teams are managing risk. Engineers want to get started. Sales teams are focused on what can be sold and when. 

"There's no point saying no, you can't do X, Y, and Z," Teesdale says. "What they need to be doing is saying, ‘Look, I've identified this risk—this is what we want to do, this might stop us doing it.’" 

The IP function, she argues, should be explaining the why, not just putting on the brakes. At its core, the internal silo is an information flow problem. When legal, engineering, and commercial teams aren't working from the same picture of the IP landscape, decisions get made in isolation, risks go unspoken, and opportunities quietly disappear. Getting that right is less about organizational structure than about building the habits and processes that keep everyone aligned.

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2. The In-House and Outside Counsel Silo

The second silo sits between in-house and external counsel, such as patent attorneys: A relationship that, when it works, is one of the most valuable in IP practice. When it doesn't, it's usually because the two parties are operating with different information.

Outside counsel sees the claims, the prosecution history, the prior art landscape. In-house sees the business roadmap, the competitive dynamics, the decisions being made three floors up that will shape what the IP needs to do in five years. When those two pictures never fully connect, the advice that gets given—however technically sound—can miss the strategic mark.

Teesdale argues that closing this gap is a shared responsibility. Outside counsel needs to ask better questions about where the business is going. In-house teams need to bring outside counsel closer to the commercial reality, not just the docket. And someone needs to own the connective tissue between the two, translating business objectives into IP strategy, and IP strategy into actionable guidance for the attorneys doing the work.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the drafting and prosecution process itself. The gap between what an inventor knows, what in-house understands about the business landscape, and what outside counsel has visibility into when drafting claims is often wider than anyone involved realizes—and it shows up later, in patents that are technically sound but strategically thin.

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3. The Company Collaboration Silo

The third silo—and by far the most consequential—is the one between two companies collaborating on technology development. 

This is where the stakes are highest, the misalignments run deepest, and where Teesdale sees the most avoidable damage done.

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When Two Companies Sit Down to Collaborate

Collaboration between companies has become a structural reality of modern technology development. As Teesdale puts it, "You can't just develop it on your own in-house." Cross-industry expertise is increasingly required, whether you're integrating a new manufacturing process, developing software-embedded hardware, or working with an academic institution on emerging research.

But collaboration between companies is not the same as collaboration within one. The interests don't always align, the long-term objectives often diverge, and the IP ownership and access structure written into the agreement at the start can quietly determine outcomes years after the project has ended.

"Everyone wants these projects to go well," Teesdale says. "But you do have to bear in mind that this is a collaboration between two companies that have quite often different business objectives. They are not a single entity, they don't have the same mission in mind of where they want to go—and sometimes they can conflict."

The danger, she explains, is in failing to account for that divergence before the project begins. Collaboration agreements that don't think carefully about post-project IP ownership or access can leave one or both parties in an untenable position long after the work is done.

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The Collaboration Agreement Problem

To illustrate the risk, Teesdale walks through a hypothetical: Two companies team up to develop a product that combines each company's core technology. The collaboration agreement divides IP ownership neatly—one company owns the rights to one component, the other owns the rights to the other. It seems clean. 

However, as Teesdale says, "You fast forward five years after that collaboration has ended, and [one party] wants to sell [their product]. If they don't have access to that [other company's] IP, they can't do that without their help." At that point, the partner holds significant leverage. "They could say, ‘We'll sell them to you—but we're the only ones who can. So we can sell them at whatever price we like.’"

The fix, Teesdale argues, isn't complicated in principle—but it requires someone to be thinking strategically about where both companies want to be years down the line, not just what the project needs to succeed. "Rewind the clock," she says. "If you're trying to negotiate that collaboration agreement, the person [on your side] would be thinking, ‘What do we want to be doing in five years' time? 10 years' time? Do we want to still be tied to [this partner] in that way?’"

It's a dynamic patent attorneys will recognize from prosecution: The decisions made earliest in the process, often under time pressure and with incomplete information about where the business is going, are the ones that are hardest to undo later. Claim scope, ownership structure, licensing terms—these aren't just legal details. They're strategic commitments.

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Where AI Fits in

Technology is beginning to close some of these gaps. Teesdale notes that AI-powered tools are already helping teams navigate collaborations more efficiently. However, she's careful to draw a clear line. "There is still a lot of human judgment that comes into it that AI cannot replicate in the same way." 

Knowing which non-standard clause actually matters in the context of a specific relationship, or whether pushing back on a particular term is worth the friction it creates—that still requires experience and strategic thinking that no tool can substitute for. The value of AI, she argues, is in handling the groundwork so that human judgment can be applied where it counts most.

The same principle applies in patent drafting and prosecution. AI is increasingly capable of handling the groundwork—prior art searches, claim drafting, office action responses—freeing attorneys to focus their judgment on the decisions that actually shape the strategic value of a patent. The technology doesn't replace the expertise, but clears the path for it.

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What Gets Lost When Strategy Is Missing

For patent attorneys attempting to advise clients on collaboration agreements, Teesdale's framework surfaces a set of questions that don't always make it into the conversation: What does this company want to be able to do with this technology in five years? What IP will they need access to in order to do it? And what does the agreement they're about to sign actually allow for?

These aren't questions about claim language or prosecution strategy. They're questions about business objectives—and they require someone who understands both the IP landscape and the commercial direction of the company to answer well.

Teesdale is direct about what happens when that person isn't in the room: “External patent attorneys haven't been involved in that. It's a little bit siloed from an internal company's perspective. You don't get that insight in quite the same way—you're not really guiding what's happening.”

That gap is particularly acute for smaller engineering companies, who often rely entirely on outside counsel for IP guidance without having anyone internally whose job is to connect that guidance to the broader business strategy. But it surfaces in larger organizations too, wherever the IP function operates at arm's length from the decisions that shape the company's long-term direction.

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The Case for Thinking Ahead

The practical implication for patent and IP professionals—whether in-house or in private practice—is that the most valuable IP advice isn't always about the patent itself. It's about the structure that surrounds it: How collaboration agreements are drafted, how IP ownership is allocated, and how the rights a company secures today will support or constrain what they want to do tomorrow.

Teesdale's three practical recommendations are worth noting for any IP professional advising clients in collaborative environments: Raise awareness inside the organization about what confidential information can and can't be used for; get involved in reviewing collaboration terms early, before the project is already underway; and support project teams on an ongoing basis, so that IP considerations are baked into how work gets done—not bolted on after the fact.

"Making sure the collaboration is set up to allow for the fact that these companies have different aims," she says. "That's effectively future-proofing what these companies want to do."

The strongest IP programs aren't built around individual patent filings. They're built around a clear line of sight from the earliest invention disclosure all the way through to enforcement, with strategy, collaboration, and process working together at every stage. That's harder to build than a patent portfolio, but it's also what makes a patent portfolio worth having.

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