When AT&T broke into three parts in 1996, Lucent got most of Bell Laboratories, and it has continued to spend about 11% of revenues on research and development. As a result, its U.S. patent portfolio now includes nearly 10,000 inventions, and its global patent portfolio about 25,000.
The man in charge of managing the patents is Michael Greene, chief operating officer of the Intellectual Property group. A lifelong AT&T and Lucent employee, Greene joined the Bell System out of the University of Arkansas Law School in 1974 as part of what is now Southwestern Bell.
Greene says he was attracted to AT&T by its reputation for giving young lawyers an opportunity to make their mark off the bat. "After one week, they gave me my first [court] case," he recalls. "I said, 'Who's going with me?' They said, 'Nobody.'"
Today there's still plenty of work for the lawyers, but the core of Greene's group consists of what Lucent dubs Intellectual Property Managers - largely engineers who may have some sales and marketing experience. Greene describes their jobs as managing patents, which ultimately means "determining what do I have, what is it worth, and how do I earn on the asset."
It wasn't always that way at AT&T. According to an old telecom industry saw - "Steal from Bell, run like hell" - AT&T rarely pursued patent violators. "They looked at Bell Labs as a national treasure," says Howard Anderson, president of The Yankee Group. Adds Peter Bernstein, president of Infonautics Consulting in Ramsey, N.J.: "When was the last time AT&T sued anybody? Their attitude toward Bell Labs was: Some things got productized and some things didn't, but at least we have those boys working late at night inventing stuff."
Another problem: AT&T didn't always know what it had. "It probably took the creation of an intellectual property office to collect the inventory [of patents] and try to match it with what competitors were up to," Bernstein says.
