The Business-First IP Playbook: David Hyams on Mapping Value and the Limits of Generic AI

In this episode of IP Innovators, host Steve Brachmann sits down with David Hyams, Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer of Longship Legal, to explore what happens when a patent attorney stops asking, "Is this patentable?" and starts asking "What is this business actually worth?" Drawing on a career that spans big law in Boston, in-house roles at Bose and AOL, and a CleanTech start-up, David brings an unusually holistic lens to IP: one that treats patents, trade secrets, contracts, and copyright not as separate disciplines, but as a matrix of legal tools in service of a company's real intangible assets.

David walks through the founding philosophy behind Longship Legal: that too many companies are spending serious money getting patents granted without ever connecting those documents to actual business value. He explains why the first conversation with any client has to start well before IP, with questions about how the business makes money, who its customers are, and what truly differentiates it in the market.

On AI, he's clear-eyed: it's a powerful accelerator of business processes, but it cannot replace the strategic human judgment an IP department needs. He also draws a sharp distinction between general LLM tools and proprietary legal AI built on restricted data sets, and why that difference matters enormously in practice.

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About the Guest:

David Hyams is Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer of Longship Legal, a digitally native, AI-forward IP firm he co-founded in 2023. With a career spanning big law, in-house roles at Bose Corporation and AOL, and IP boutiques, David brings a uniquely holistic perspective to intellectual property, one built on understanding the business before the patent.

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