IP & board advisory

Most boards have more IP exposure than they realize.

You didn't take a board seat to oversee assets nobody has properly valued or protected. The fiduciary standard hasn't changed, but the assets and the risks it covers have. I help independent directors close the IP, AI, and data oversight gap, before a regulator, an activist, or a missed licensing market does it for them.

Thirty years in the rooms where the deals get done, and the cross-industry patterns that come with them.

Request a board briefing 30 minutes. Complimentary. No pitch. Just comparing notes.

Thirty years in the room with

I was in the room

Three rooms. Three questions nobody owned.

The board that approved in twenty minutes

I watched a board approve a major IP transaction in under twenty minutes. Smart directors. Real fiduciary discipline on every other agenda item. But nobody asked about termination rights, AI training exposure, or what the assets would be worth in five years. Not because they didn't care, but because no one in the room owned the question.

That's the gap.

The audit committee that inherited AI

An audit committee chair told me, off the record, that AI was now "her problem" because no other committee wanted it. Nine years on the board. She'd seen Sarbanes-Oxley. She'd seen ESG. She knew when something didn't belong in audit.

It landed there anyway.

The activist who saw it first

A company with most of its voting control locked with two founders, and institutional investors holding the equity and almost none of the power. When the stock dropped, an activist appeared overnight, and the board had no answer, because for years no one had asked the right question: what is this company actually worth, and how do we defend it?

An oversight problem.

"I've learned to see the questions boards forget to ask, before they become headlines."

Billion-dollar oversights happen in rooms full of brilliant directors. The difference isn't competence, it's pattern recognition: seeing the connections across industries that are invisible to most, knowing which questions get asked, which get assumed, and which ones nobody owns. It's having someone in your corner who has been on the operator side of these deals, and knows exactly what the board should have asked.

Hear it direct

The C-suite gap, in 38 seconds.

Look at how any C-suite is organized: CEO, finance, strategy, operations, general counsel. Someone protects the IP. Nobody is charged with monetizing it. That isn't a personnel issue, it's a structural one, and the board carries it.

The thing nobody on your board is saying out loud.

What I bring to the boardroom

Your IP is an asset class. Let's treat it like one.

Board briefings & director education

Closed-door sessions on IP governance, AI licensing exposure, and the evolving fiduciary standard around intangible assets, for directors who want to ask sharper questions in the next meeting.

Independent IP & data audits

A board-facing valuation and monetization assessment of the company's intangible portfolio, surfacing what is dormant, what is exposed, and what is unrecognized on the balance sheet.

Strategic counsel & dealmaking

Senior business counsel for boards reviewing licensing agreements, AI partnerships, catalog transactions, and strategic dispositions, where term, scope, control, and termination rights determine long-term value.

The track record

$0 → $40M

Launched a digital distribution business from zero.

$30M+

Structured deals generating incremental revenue.

Billions

Generated for employers including Disney, DreamWorks, and NBCUniversal. Yes, billions, with a B.

You already know these

The fiduciary standard hasn't changed. The assets it covers have.

Fiduciary driftCaremark and its progeny now reach IP, AI, and data risk. "We didn't know" is no longer a defense.

Quiet AI exposureGenerative models are training on proprietary data right now. Without governance, you can't see the trade, and you may be bleeding revenue.

The IP gapThe general counsel protects it. Nobody monetizes it. Audit committees inherit it by default.

Activist attentionShareholder activists are pricing unmonetized IP into their thesis, before it shows up in your reporting.

Closing windowsAI licensing markets are forming now. The companies that define terms early shape what everyone else pays.

Request a board briefing

You may be carrying more, and more risk, than you think.

A dormant IP portfolioLegacy content, patents, datasets, or brand extensions sitting on the shelf in a market that is actively bidding for them.

An AI exposure no one has namedProprietary data being used to train models, with no licensing, no audit rights, and no governance policy.

A deal structure that won't age wellBroad rights, long terms, no termination triggers, in a category that will look unrecognizable in five years.

Thirty minutes with our founder, Christine Lawton, who spent years in the rooms at Disney, DreamWorks, NBCUniversal, and Yuga Labs. If your board has an IP or AI exposure worth examining, we'll find it. If not, you'll walk away with a sharper lens either way.