An IP portfolio is a living thing. It grows, it conflicts, it gets eaten by competitors while nobody is watching. And still most companies manage it like it's an archive.

In 1975, intangible assets represented 17% of S&P 500 value. In 2025, according to Ocean Tomo research: 92%. That shift happened within a single working lifetime. Every strategy document in every boardroom with a serious IP portfolio acknowledges it in some form. IP is a core asset. IP must be protected. IP defines competitive position.

And then the team managing that asset opens a spreadsheet to check the renewal dates.

The problem is not that the spreadsheet is old. Old tools can work. The problem is considerably more specific: the tools that manage most IP portfolios today don't fail visibly. They produce output. Searches return results. Renewal logs show current dates. Reports get filed. And in the absence of an alert, the absence of a flag, the absence of any signal that something was missed, the CFO who receives that report reads it as confirmation. Everything is in order. The system didn't fail. It stayed silent.

What I observed directly in this market: a trademark that appeared registrable, that cleared every available search, that had no opposition, carrying a visual conflict that none of the searches were designed to find. The name was checked. The similar names were checked. The logo, the graphic similarity, the cultural register in a secondary market, none of that was covered. The search was done. The report was green. The risk was already present.

Uncertainty dressed as security.

The industry has a structural explanation for why this persists. Two simultaneous brakes on the same system. The client won't push for change because IP management is mission critical, the cost of a failed migration, a lost process, an error in a critical deadline during transition feels higher than the cost of staying with what works. The vendor won't innovate aggressively because an error in a mission critical system has consequences that outweigh the upside of improvement. The result is a stable equilibrium. Nobody is being negligent. The portfolio keeps being managed like an archive. And according to EY research, 76% of legal teams are still doing exactly that, manual processes, spreadsheets, the same systems they were using a decade ago. According to the Thomson Reuters Legal Department Operations Index, only 18% of in-house teams currently use any technology to automate routine tasks.

In a recent public exchange among IP practitioners, partners, product leads, in-house counsel, the consensus was uncomfortable. The tools are broken. The market is years behind where it should be. People inside the largest platforms in this space have said publicly that something was fundamentally wrong with the model. And the standard practice in most organizations managing a serious IP portfolio still involves spreadsheets, limited searches, and reports that confirm what was checked, not what was missed.

The diagnosis is not new. The market knows. It isn't moving.

Ask a senior IP professional why they run searches the way they run them. The honest answer, more often than not, is some version of: we've always done it this way, and it has worked. Push further, how do you know it worked? The conversation stops. Not because the professional is incompetent. Because the process was in place when they arrived, and in the absence of visible failure, there has been no reason to question it. The absence of visible failure is not evidence of performance. It is evidence of silence. And according to F1F9 research, 17% of large companies have already recorded direct financial losses from spreadsheet errors, not from negligence, from the same confidence that the system was working because nothing had gone wrong yet.

There is a specific cost to this silence that rarely appears in any report. Companies paying annual maintenance fees and annuities on patents that no longer protect any active product line, technology abandoned in practice but kept alive on paper because nobody reviewed the portfolio against current revenue. The maintenance cycle runs on autopilot: renewal after renewal, jurisdiction after jurisdiction, assets that stopped being relevant years ago still consuming budget because the process was never connected to the business reality around them. According to USPTO maintenance data, 56% of US patents are abandoned before the 20-year term. Not because the technology failed, because nobody asked whether it was still worth protecting. Meanwhile, the innovations actually driving the business today sit unprotected or under-protected because the process never flagged the gap. The portfolio grows in volume. It shrinks in relevance. The spreadsheet doesn't know the difference.

The CFO sits outside this equilibrium. Which is exactly why the CFO is the most important person in this conversation, and the least informed one.

The IP budget was approved. The renewal confirmations arrive. The portfolio reports are filed. Nothing, in any of those documents, describes what the search didn't cover. Nothing flags the graphic similarity that wasn't checked, the cultural register that wasn't crossed, the secondary market that wasn't included. The information that would trigger the right question is structurally absent from every document the CFO sees.

The IP team isn't concealing anything. The tools were never built to surface what they don't cover.

A system that tracks what it tracks cannot report on what it doesn't track. The gap is invisible not by intention, by construction. And that construction produces something more dangerous than a failed search: it produces a confirmed one. Green report. No alerts. Deadline logged. The CFO has every reason to believe the portfolio is under control. The portfolio is under observation. There is a significant difference between the two, and it only becomes visible when something that should have been caught, wasn't.

At that point, the timeline matters. IP conflicts, unnecessary renewals, undetected infringements, these don't announce themselves in advance. By the time the issue surfaces, the window for low-cost resolution is often already closed. The organization that managed its most valuable asset with the confidence of having done the right thing discovers it was doing the minimum thing. And minimum, in a portfolio that, as of 2025, represents 92% of enterprise value, is a very expensive standard.

The companies moving ahead of this aren't the ones with the largest IP portfolios or the most sophisticated legal teams. They are the ones where someone in a position of authority asked the question that changes the entire conversation: what exactly is this system not telling me?

That question is the beginning of a different kind of IP management. Not more filings, not more renewals, not more reports that confirm what was already logged. Something structurally different, built around what the portfolio needs to be visible, not just administered.

There is a second question inside that one. A harder one. It doesn't involve spreadsheets or search coverage or renewal processes. It involves what happens to this entire framework when AI enters the equation. And most of the organizations still managing IP the traditional spreadsheets way aren't ready for that question yet.

But that is a conversation for another day.

By Nuno Rivotti,
CPO of Techframe

As the Chief Product Officer at Techframe, Nuno Rivotti leads the company’s product vision and strategy. His core responsibilities involve overseeing the entire product lifecycle, from conceptualization and development to market launch. Nuno works at the intersection of technology, design, and business, managing the product management, design, and engineering teams to build products that not only resonate with users but also drive significant business growth. He ensures the product roadmap aligns with Techframe’s overarching goals and leverages market insights to keep the company at the forefront of the technology sector.