Moving from defense to offense has paid dividends for the intellectual property legal team at Irvine-based CoreLogic Inc.
The company has gotten $22 million in revenue from licensing its IP portfolio, which now has more than 50 issued U.S. patents and another 60 patent applications.
That’s not huge by CoreLogic’s general standards—the property information, analytics and services specialist had revenue of $1.3 billion last year and a recent market value of nearly $2.5 billion.
Revenue from IP did not exist for the company a few years ago, though, and now it’s a profit center that’s likely to continue to grow as the tech-driven company expands its offerings, according to Rouz Tabaddor, CoreLogic’s vice president and chief intellectual property counsel.
“CoreLogic is a growing technology company,” and IP is a critical component of that, said Tabaddor.
He said it will continue to be a source of revenue going forward.
Tabaddor, who start-ed the company’s IP program from scratch in 2006, won the Rising Star award at the Business Journal’s fifth annual General Counsel Awards on Sept. 23 at Hotel Irvine (see related stories on pages 1, 5, 6 and 8).
The growth of the company’s IP department reflected a change in strategy for CoreLogic and its predecessor company, Santa Ana-based title company First American Corp.
Tabaddor joined First American in 2006.
At that time, “no one was really managing the litigation,” Tabaddor said. “They were looking for someone to come in and manage the process.”
First American, one of the country’s largest title insurers, was more likely to settle patent litigation lawsuits—typically involving trademark and domain rights—than fight them, he said.
Even the company’s iconic name was being used in hundreds of occurrences across the country without First American’s consent and without too much response from the company.
First American “didn’t like litigation. They were usually only involved in the defensive side,” Tabaddor said. “It was a slow process” of changing the culture and issuing new patents, as well as enforcing the company’s trademarks and patents, he said.
First American completed the long-planned separation of its core title insurance operations—now called First American Financial Corp.—in 2010. Its technology and data operations split off under the CoreLogic banner, and Tabaddor went along with the new entity.
“That’s where most of the technology was,” he said.
CoreLogic’s legal team now stands at about 20 attorneys, with Tabaddor and a few others focused on IP.
The IP group oversees a trademark portfolio and a copyright portfolio with thousands of copyrights, in addition to issued and pending patents.
The group has prosecuted and examined hundreds of patent applications for the company, covering technologies related to financial systems, software and business methods, mechanical devices, turbines, medical devices, and semiconductor and braking systems.
Tabaddor also has instituted the company’s first auditing program to ensure compliance with CoreLogic’s various licensing agreements. The program brought in more than $1 million for the company in its first year.
His team still needs to play defense on occasion. Among Tabaddor’s more noteworthy accomplishments has been the successful defense of the company in a case in Texas. An initial decision in favor of CoreLogic in 2011 was affirmed the following year by the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.
Strong Defense
A vigorous defense against patent-assertion companies and other nonpracticing entities—sometimes known as “patent trolls”—is a must these days for technology companies, according to Tabaddor.
“If you are seen as a weak (defendant), you’ll get sued more often,” he said. “We fought the first few (patent cases) very aggressively. We haven’t seen any other suits in a couple years.”
IP law wasn’t the initial plan for Tabaddor, who comes from a family of mechanical engineers and has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Akron in Ohio.
A chance meeting with a family friend pushed him toward IP law.
“They said I should look into IP law; it’s a fusion of law and engineering,” said Tabaddor, who then went to Akron’s law school.
Tabaddor remains involved in engineering. He is also an inventor on a number of patent applications related to CoreLogic’s technology.
