Program

1. Navigating Patent Licensing and Influence on Cost in the Electric Vehicle Industry

• Overview: A deep dive into the patent landscape of the EV industry, focusing on key areas of technology like battery design, electric drivetrains, charging infrastructure, and autonomous driving systems.

2. Global Perspectives on EV Patent Licensing and Litigation

• Overview: A comparative analysis of how patent licensing and litigation is handled in key global markets for EVs, including the U.S., Europe, China, and other emerging markets.

3. Patent Litigation and Dispute Resolution in EV Technologies

• Overview: Exploring the risks and strategies associated with patent disputes in the rapidly developing EV market.

4. Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) in Electric Vehicle Technology

• Overview: The role of SEPs in the development and licensing of EV technologies, particularly in relation to global standards for wireless communication, charging infrastructure, and autonomous driving.

This session will be moderated by Wei Shi

This panel will bring together experienced licensing professionals, legal advisors, and industry executives who have successfully navigated the complexities of doing licensing deals involving Chinese life sciences assets. Over the past five years, China has emerged as one of the most active markets for life sciences deal-making globally, with cross-border licensing transactions reaching record levels and Chinese biopharma companies increasingly becoming sought-after partners for innovative therapies. This surge in activity underscores the strategic importance of understanding the unique regulatory, cultural, and business dynamics critical for companies seeking to in-license or out-license intellectual property with Chinese partners as this market continues to expand and evolve.

The panel will explore key strategic considerations and practical insights, addressing questions such as:

• What are the key regulatory and legal frameworks governing deals involving Chinese life sciences assets, and how do they differ from Western jurisdictions?
• How should companies approach due diligence when evaluating potential Chinese licensees or licensors?
• What are the common deal structures for China licensing transactions, including territory splits, milestone payments, and royalty arrangements?
• How do cultural factors and negotiation styles impact deal-making with Chinese counterparties?
• What IP protection strategies should be employed before, during, and after entering a licensing arrangement involving Chinese life sciences assets?
• How can companies navigate CFIUS, export controls, and other cross-border regulatory considerations when licensing to or from China?
• What are the emerging trends in deals involving Chinese life sciences assets, including the rise of Chinese biotechs as licensors of innovative therapies?
• How should companies structure option agreements and rights of first negotiation in the China context?

This session will be moderated by Adam Falconi

Federal laboratories produce world-class innovations in defense, health, energy, and deep tech, yet licensing them to industry often faces distinct hurdles: regulatory and administrative burdens (e.g., Bayh-Dole/Stevenson-Wydler compliance), export controls and dual-use restrictions, misalignment between public-mission priorities and private-sector timelines, scientist incentives and “cognitive dissonance” around commercialization, and difficulty identifying/prioritizing market-ready technologies.

The Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC)—a nationwide network of >300 labs—has spent 50+ years bridging these gaps through education, matchmaking, tools, and partnerships. Recent examples include the DoD’s no-fee patent “holiday” evaluation licenses (2026 pilot), new interagency commercialization handbooks, expanded SBIR/STTR–tech-transfer linkages, and the formal FLC–LES partnership (launched 2024) that routes high-quality federal licensing deals into the LES Deal of Distinction Awards.

This session will examine persistent and emerging challenges through real case studies (e.g., dual-use aerospace/defense tech, biomedical devices, clean-energy innovations) and highlight practical FLC solutions: the FLC Business matchmaking platform, Learning Center trainings, regional networks, awards programs, and new entrepreneurial collaborations (e.g., with FedTech and RTI). Attendees will leave with actionable strategies for structuring long-term collaborative agreements, performing effective due diligence on federal opportunities, navigating export controls, and building win-win lab–industry relationships.

Diverse workshop perspectives (federal lab TTO, FLC leadership, industry licensee, IP/export-control counsel) will ensure balanced viewpoints from government, private sector, and legal/regulatory angles. The discussion will directly address the CFP guiding questions on best practices for academia/federal-lab licensing agreements and industry methods for identifying high-potential technologies.

Take Home Points:

• Pinpoint the top 4–5 barriers to federal-lab licensing and proven mitigation tactics used by successful licensees.
• Use FLC’s free tools, networks, and recent initiatives (DoD patent pilot, new handbooks, LES partnership) to shorten the path from lab disclosure to executed license.
• Draft licensing terms that protect agency missions, reward inventors, manage export controls, and foster ongoing collaboration.
• Apply lessons from award-winning federal deals (via FLC and LES programs) to your own portfolios.
• Build lasting relationships with federal TTOs and the FLC network for future opportunities.

This session will be moderated by Whitney Hastings

The workshop will discuss the intricacies of handling IP as part of Aerospace and Defense (A&D) in contracts, how IP is viewed by the A&D companies, which forms of IP is most valuable, how to protect A&D IP from being stolen by adversaries. This workshop will coordinate with the LESI A&D activity that Bob is also championing.

This session will be moderated by Bob Held

The patent monetization landscape is undergoing a structural shift. The collapse of inter partes review as a reliable invalidation vehicle has driven a tactical pivot toward ex parte reexamination, while heightened Daubert scrutiny is forcing litigants to meet increasingly granular standards of proof on damages. Firms are securing significant trial wins, yet appellate vulnerability threatens to unwind those outcomes, sometimes catastrophically.

Recently, a failure in apportionment allowed the Federal Circuit to reduce a jury verdict to nominal damages, sending a signal to patent holders, litigation counsel, and the private capital markets that fund these cases.

This workshop brings together perspectives from IP counsel, litigation finance, and financial modelling to examine the critical gap between winning a verdict and monetizing its value through appeal. As demand increases for what funders are calling “”appellate monetization,”” (the underwriting of post-trial legal assets) the ability to construct damages models that withstand scrutiny has become increasingly important in the entire monetization chain.

From the litigator’s chair, we examine how counsel can navigate the evolving evidentiary gateways, where the line between an admissible damages model and a fatal exclusion is increasingly narrow. We consider how early strategic choices shape not only trial outcomes but appellate resilience and, ultimately, monetization potential.

From the funder’s perspective, we address how litigation financiers evaluate and price risk into their deployment decisions, including an examination of appellate monetization dynamics. Legal asset valuation, investment duration, and risk-off mechanisms all feed into a sophisticated and demanding underwriting and investment management process.

From a valuation lens, we examine idiosyncratic financial modelling frameworks designed to meet this challenge including data-oriented income approaches that anchor analysis to the real economic unit at issue, probabilistic methods to isolate incremental value, and defensible comparables analysis utilizing tiered royalty structures where thresholds are tied to actual licensing and market behaviour, via recent case illustrations.

The stakes extend well beyond any single case, shaping litigation strategy, funding economics, and the valuation of legal assets in the robust and growing market for alternative assets.

This session will be moderated by Adam Falconer

The Unified Patent Court (UPC) is reshaping patent litigation in Europe, especially in cases involving infringement across both Europe and the United States. By the time of the LES 2026 Annual Meeting in San Diego, the UPC will have just passed its third anniversary. Importantly, the UPC Court of Appeal will have issued a substantial number of decisions, offering greater clarity on the court’s approach—widely seen as favourable to patent holders.

The UPC has already influenced the resolution of global patent disputes, often encouraging early settlements. This workshop session, if accepted, will provide the latest insights into this trend, including the UPC’s supportive stance on injunctions. Attendees will learn how to coordinate litigation strategies between US district courts and the UPC to take advantage of both systems. The session also will cover how to prepare patent portfolios for UPC litigation, with practical tips on prosecution strategies that enhance enforceability.

Additionally, the session will address the implications of the UPC system for licensing and co-ownership agreements, emphasizing the importance of adapting contractual provisions to reflect the new European patent landscape. One of the speakers is a partner at the firm selected by Juve Patent as the UPC firm of the year for 2026.

Key discussion points include:

1. Summaries of key UPC decisions, along with statistics and emerging litigation trends.
2. Comparison of UPC and US district court litigation, focusing on differences in speed, cost, and available remedies.
3. Patent prosecution strategies to strengthen portfolios for UPC enforcement.
4. Guidance for licensing and co-ownership agreements under the UPC system.

This session is designed to provide practical, strategic insights for navigating the evolving landscape of transatlantic patent litigation and portfolio management.

“What happens when marketing cannot deliver your invention summary in time? What if AI could help you generate high-quality licensing materials in hours instead of weeks?

This interactive workshop demonstrates how to implement AI in real tech transfer workflows using structured prompting, CustomGPTs, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Rather than focusing on theory, the session walks through a realistic scenario in which a TTO must rapidly produce a marketing document from technical source material. Participants will see how AI tools can be used step by step to move from patent or disclosure to polished marketing content.

The workshop introduces a repeatable prompting framework that separates four components: request, layout, restrictions, and content. Attendees will learn how this structure improves output quality and consistency. Live-style demonstrations will show how to:

• Analyze patents and extract commercially relevant insights
• Convert technical disclosures into persuasive marketing summaries
• Identify target industries and market segments
• Use persona-based prompting to refine value propositions
• Build and deploy CustomGPTs for recurring tech transfer tasks
• Apply RAG to ground outputs in curated knowledge sources

The session also emphasizes human oversight and iterative refinement to improve reliability and reduce risk.

Participants will leave with practical workflows, prompt templates, and implementation strategies that can be immediately applied within their own tech transfer offices to accelerate commercialization efforts.

This session will be moderated by Jericho Wilkerson

This roundtable will explore practical and strategic considerations in common life sciences partnerships including joint development agreements and technology and IP licensing agreements. The speakers will review these partnerships from the partner selection phase through the agreement negotiation phase to the management of the relationship post agreement. The speakers will provide real world examples both from their experience and recent cases to demonstrate where critical attention should be focused and where complications frequently arise for both parties in these partnerships. Topics will include, among others, background and licensed technology, IP ownership, royalty clauses and regulatory, commercialization, and termination considerations.

This roundtable will discuss effective licensing strategies to both successfully enforce and defend against patent, trademark, and copyright litigation claims. The discussion will focus on (1) drafting dos and don’ts; (2) effective negotiation techniques; and (3) licensing strategies in litigation matters. The roundtable will discuss case studies and provide an update on relevant case law as well as walk through real-world applications of how an effective licensing strategy can set you up for litigation success.

Long before generative AI captured headlines, “classic” machine learning was already solving one of biomedicine’s hardest problems: isolating a small number of meaningful signals from vast, noisy biological datasets. Support Vector Machines (SVMs), and feature selection variants such as SVM Recursive Feature Elimination, still matter where licensing decisions are most exposed: limited training data, high clinical consequences, and scrutiny from clinicians, regulators, payors, and commercial partners. Pioneering IP here faces a paradox: foundational patents may be filed years before clinical validation, reimbursement pathways, and even the eventual market fully matures. That gap makes deal structure the bridge from patent to patient, aligning validation, updates, and trust.

This interactive, non technical roundtable uses SVM based diagnostics and cell phenotyping workflows as a compact case study to connect three recurring LES deal challenges: (1) translating foundational algorithms into commercial leverage, (2) defining data, model, and software rights that enable validation, deployment, and maintenance, and (3) structuring licenses that increase trust and long term value rather than creating zero sum battles, with deal scenarios and discussion.

We stay practical: what is realistically protectable, and how, when value lives less in the math and more in feature representations, curated training data, implementation know how, and clinical evidence; how to assess freedom to operate and open source exposure in traditional ML stacks; and how to allocate rights when performance, explainability, dataset access, improvements, and governance are the real negotiating terrain. Participants will apply a checklist to common AI/data licensing tensions: access vs. control; provenance, privacy, and permitted use; validation, audit, and publication rights; field of use boundaries, exclusivity, and sublicensing; and improvements, retraining, change management, and post-market monitoring.

To broaden valuation thinking, we briefly map cross-industry applicability (finance, cybersecurity, industrial quality control) and discuss what it means when claim scope or know-how becomes valuable in markets that emerged years after filing.

We close with a deal room lens on negotiation: listening-led, partnership-oriented moves that surface constraints, de-escalate technical impasses, and turn “no” into the next best joint step, an approach we call the Defendable Deal. Discussion is limited to publicly shareable practices.

Public funding is fueling innovation across biotech, AI, energy, semiconductors, and defense—but government money comes with strings attached. For licensing professionals, understanding how federal funding reshapes IP rights is critical to protecting value and avoiding unpleasant surprises.

This roundtable will examine 10 high-impact IP considerations in government-funded R&D and licensing transactions, using short hypotheticals and real-world examples to spark discussion. Speakers will include representatives from private industry, academia, and government contracts practice to provide multiple vantage points on risk, compliance, and deal strategy.

Discussion topics will include:

• How Bayh-Dole actually works in practice (and common misconceptions)
• The scope of the government’s nonexclusive license and its downstream implications
• Managing data rights in defense and dual-use technologies
• SBIR/STTR-specific IP considerations
• Structuring sublicenses when subject inventions are involved
• Navigating joint development agreements with mixed funding sources
• Handling diligence disclosures and post-closing risk in M&A
• Publication rights vs. trade secret protection in university collaborations

Participants will walk away with:

• A framework for evaluating how government funding affects exclusivity and commercialization strategy
• A working “Top 10” issue-spotting guide for licensing professionals
• Practical contract-drafting approaches to mitigate common risks
• Insight into how in-house counsel and universities evaluate and negotiate these issues

Whether you represent licensors, licensees, universities, startups, or established companies, this session will help you structure government-involved deals with confidence—and class.

Artificial intelligence is now embedded in software development, data analytics, content generation, life sciences research, and defense technologies, among other areas. Yet many licensing and commercial agreements still rely on legacy provisions drafted before the age of AI. As a result, core clauses governing data use, scope of license, derivative works, ownership, audit rights, indemnification, and compliance often fail to allocate risk clearly or address emerging AI use cases. This roundtable moves beyond high-level discussions and focuses on practical drafting. The roundtable will examine how traditional provisions should evolve when data may be used for model training, when AI systems assist in development, or when automated systems generate outputs that have commercial value.

Particular attention will be given to distinguishing training rights from deployment and output rights, allocating ownership in AI-assisted developments, preserving trade secret protection, and structuring IP ownership clauses in collaborative environments. The session will also address contractual governance mechanisms, including treating AI agents as users subject to defined permission levels, embedding data lineage and audit concepts into agreements, and allocating regulatory risk under evolving privacy, export, and AI regulatory frameworks. Through clause comparisons and practical examples, attendees will gain a framework for updating legacy templates to reflect AI-enabled realities while maintaining balanced, commercially workable agreements.

Free-download SOPs and field notes for productive license relationships — informed by hundreds of court cases — to help parties keep their dealings on course and off the rocks.
For students and managers: The Lighthouse Rules show how parties can get license agreements signed sooner; manage difficulties; and guard against gamesmanship. With pro tips and extensive case citations. For lawyers: Use the Lighthouse Rules as a toolkit when reviewing others’ contract drafts. Better yet: Save time and money — and break out of the legal-review hamster wheel — by proposing selected Lighthouse Rules to incorporate by reference in a binding term sheet. (Especially useful in smaller matters.)

This roundtable will explore intellectual property strategies for medical devices across major global markets, including the United States, Europe, and Asia (with a focus on Japan and China). As medical device innovation becomes increasingly global, differences in patent systems, enforcement practices, and licensing norms have a direct impact on commercialisation and deal‑making.

For licensing professionals, patent prosecution, PTAB proceedings, and district court litigation have long been interconnected. What has changed is the degree to which licensing outcomes now turn on how deliberately those stages are coordinated. Decisions made during prosecution increasingly determine standing, damages and lost-profits theories, disclosure obligations, and enforcement viability across venues. This roundtable focuses on how licensing teams and their counsel can manage these interdependencies intentionally to protect and enhance portfolio value.

Drawing from recent PTAB decisions and district court rulings, the roundtable will examine how ownership structures, assignment practices, and prosecution control affect standing and enforceability in licensing and enforcement campaigns. The discussion will address how claim scope, prosecution history, and record development shape damages and lost-profits analyses, and how early prosecution choices can either strengthen or undermine valuation and negotiating leverage.

The roundtable will also address disclosure and record-creation issues that frequently surface in PTAB challenges and litigation. Speakers will discuss how statements made to examiners, as well as omissions from the prosecution record, can later constrain enforcement positions or be affirmatively used against a patent owner. Particular attention will be paid to examiner error, why it matters in licensing-driven portfolios, and how failures in examination can create downstream risk if not addressed through proactive prosecution management and record correction.

A portion of the discussion will focus on prosecution control and continuation strategy as core licensing tools rather than administrative formalities. The roundtable will explore how disciplined continuation practice can preserve optionality, adapt claim coverage to market and competitive developments, mitigate estoppel and PTAB exposure, and support evolving enforcement and monetization objectives.

Participants will leave with concrete, practice-tested guidance for integrating prosecution, PTAB strategy, and district court considerations into a cohesive licensing-forward IP strategy, reflecting how sophisticated portfolios are built, defended, and monetized in modern licensing programs.

You receive a shipment of cell lines or other biomaterials from a commercial vendor, biorepository, or academic institution. The accompanying terms say “”non-commercial use only.”” But what does that really mean – and what happens when the line between research and commercialization blurs? Across the licensing landscape, approaches to biomaterial use restrictions vary wildly. Some licensors impose strict non-commercial and non-transfer limitations; others take a more permissive stance. Many recipients never fully investigate what restrictions apply to the materials they receive, and it is often difficult to identify the operative terms through the morass of standard terms and conditions, label licenses, and flow-throughs.

For licensors, biomaterial licensing often presents a significant and underexplored opportunity. By offering agreements that provide greater clarity and alignment with the diverse ways in which biomaterials are actually used in industry (such as tiered licenses that clearly delineate what is and is not permitted under each tier), licensors can potentially unlock new revenue streams and strengthen long-term relationships with licensees.

The result is a field rich with potential: licensors who take a strategic approach to biomaterial licensing can maximize the value of their assets, while commercial licensees benefit from clearer expectations and more predictable terms.

This roundtable will pull back the curtain on the evolving legal and licensing landscape surrounding cell lines and biomaterials. Whether you represent an academic research institution, a commercial enterprise, or a biomaterial repository, this roundtable will challenge your assumptions about how biomaterials are – and should be – licensed. Our speakers will examine recent developments in caselaw and federal policy that impact biomaterial licensing, identify some best practices and share practical insights on structuring agreements, managing risk, and navigating the gray areas that make biomaterial licensing one of the most underappreciated minefields in technology transfer. Come prepared to engage: after an overview of recent legal developments, we will open the floor for an interactive discussion on real-world approaches, common pain points, and strategies for addressing biomaterials.

Bayh-Dole compliance is often viewed as a university obligation, until it becomes an industry risk issue. As federal oversight increases, compliance with subject invention reporting, title elections, utilization disclosures, confirmatory licenses, and U.S. manufacturing requirements is directly affecting transaction timelines, valuation, diligence outcomes, and post-license obligations.
This roundtable will examine Bayh-Dole compliance through the lens of the deal. What happens when required reporting was missed? How do U.S. manufacturing requirements under 35 U.S.C. § 204 affect sublicensing or offshore production plans? What representations should industry partners seek? How should licensors prepare for diligence involving federally funded IP?

Rather than focusing solely on statutory language, this roundtable will walk through real-world compliance breakdowns that surface during licensing negotiations, M&A diligence, and portfolio reviews, and how both universities and companies can proactively mitigate risk.

Key topics will include:

• Common compliance deficiencies identified during agency review or transaction diligence
• Title election timing and risks under 37 C.F.R. § 401.14
• Utilization reporting: what industry partners should understand before signing
• U.S. manufacturing requirements and waiver strategies
• Confirmatory licenses and government support clause issues
• Representations, warranties, and risk allocation in federally funded IP agreements
• Building compliance systems that support smoother transactions

Attendees will gain practical guidance on aligning compliance practices with commercial strategy, reducing surprises during diligence, and structuring agreements that appropriately allocate federal compliance obligations. Whether you are licensing university technology, acquiring federally funded assets, structuring sublicenses, or managing an institutional portfolio, this roundtable will provide actionable insights to ensure Bayh-Dole compliance strengthens, rather than complicates, your next transaction.

The venture exit bottleneck has emerged as a defining structural challenge in today’s innovation economy. In 2024, only about 40 out of roughly 1,300 venture-backed companies valued at $500 million or more achieved successful exits, leaving billions in capital locked up and significantly constraining distributions back to investors. With IPO markets uneven and strategic M&A activity selective and valuation-sensitive, the traditional liquidity pathways that underpin the venture capital model remain compressed. This environment is forcing startups, investors, and boards to rethink how value is created, realized, and communicated during extended holding periods. One increasingly important pathway is intellectual property monetization, particularly structured licensing strategies that convert innovation into recurring revenue streams without requiring a full company sale. In a constrained exit market, licensing is a strategic lever for sustaining returns and reshaping the venture lifecycle.

This roundtable, led by Silicon-Valley based startup funding and IP valuation expert, Efrat Kasznik, will explore how licensing professionals can play a central role in helping IP-rich startups navigate this prolonged exit cycle. Discussion topics will include: identifying licensable assets within broader patent and data portfolios; aligning licensing strategy with venture-backed growth narratives; structuring deals that preserve optionality for future exits; balancing enforcement, partnership, and ecosystem-building approaches; and integrating licensing revenue into valuation frameworks that investors recognize and reward. We will also examine cross-industry case studies highlighting how companies have used licensing to extend runway, improve EBITDA profiles, and create strategic leverage in acquisition discussions.

Participants will leave with practical takeaways: frameworks for evaluating when licensing is accretive versus distracting; approaches to communicating IP monetization strategies to investors and bankers; and actionable steps licensing executives can implement immediately to unlock value.

The venture capital landscape has never been more divided. AI startups are commanding unprecedented valuations and round sizes, with AI and machine learning accounting for nearly two-thirds of total venture deal value in 2025,while the vast majority of startups competing outside the AI spotlight are facing a materially tougher capital environment. In this new reality, a well-structured IP portfolio has emerged as one of the most credible signals of defensibility, differentiation, and long-term value that a non-AI startup can offer to investors.

In this roundtable session, Lynn Dudinsky Vice President of Foresight Valuation Group will lead a focused discussion on how startups operating outside the AI funding boom can strategically leverage their intellectual property to compete for capital, strengthen their valuation narratives, and unlock alternative financing structures. Drawing on his experience advising IP-intensive companies across industries, Lynn will explore how patents, trade secrets, and licensing strategies can be positioned not just as legal assets, but as active funding tools.

Key questions the session will address include: How do investors actually assess IP portfolios when evaluating non-AI startups, and what makes a portfolio compelling versus generic? What role can licensing revenue and IP-backed debt play as non-dilutive alternatives to equity financing? And how should founders and their advisors think about building and communicating IP value at each stage of the funding lifecycle?

Attendees will leave with practical frameworks for evaluating and strengthening startup IP strategies, actionable insights on how to present IP assets to investors and lenders, and a forward-looking perspective on how the funding landscape for non-AI startups is likely to evolve. For licensing professionals who advise or work alongside startups, this session offers directly applicable tools for a market environment that rewards those who can translate IP into financing leverage.

This roundtable will provide a battle-tested approach to building a profitable IP portfolio and structuring a licensing campaign for it.

First, we will focus on a “”diagnostic”” audit of your IP portfolio. We’ll explain two of our preferred approaches, and why both are necessary: a data-driven approach; and a hands-on “”in the room”” approach (e.g., one-on-one interviews, Department visits, etc.). The takeaway will be a roadmap for determining what IP is “on the shelf” and where the value is. We will teach how to find the highest-value markets within the current IP portfolio, and how to gauge industry interest.

Second, we will explain what a well-structured licensing campaign should look like. This would involve a discussion of finding potential “targets,” understanding how your IP fits into an accused product, understanding the “royalty base” and likely licensing rates, and how to define “success” upfront.

Third, we will discuss some of the practical considerations involved in (potential) IP litigation. We will discuss how to choose an optimal jurisdiction (with an eye toward the whole campaign), the advantages (and disadvantages) of enforcing IP in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and ways to find alternative sources of revenue (e.g., investments from companies, litigation funders, and risk-sharing/contingency arrangements re: law firms).

Fourth, we will discuss how to best write an IP-notice letter to start the campaign. In particular, we will address: (1) how to avoid declaratory-judgment problems, yet still invite a response; (2) how to consider the legal effect of a notice letter re: method patents and willful infringement; and (3) whether (and when) the better approach is to not write a letter at all.

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Licensing agreements routinely allocate technical and regulatory risk but rarely account for the economic consequences of incomplete information. When representations about exclusivity, safety, provenance, or regulatory status prove inaccurate, disputes become questions of economic overpayment rather than simple breach. This roundtable applies price‑premium and information‑asymmetry concepts to real licensing structures, showing how milestone payments, indemnities, and clawbacks can be calibrated to actual risk transfer. Through an annotated agreement exercise, attendees will identify where value assumptions fail and how contract structure can reduce post‑transaction conflict. The emphasis is on translating damages theory into practical deal design rather than retrospective litigation analysis.

University tech transfer offices are under increasing pressure to translate research into real-world impact-but the path from lab bench to market remains fraught with complexity. This roundtable brings together seasoned technology transfer leaders from two of the nation’s leading UC institutions and a practitioner experienced in life sciences transactions for a candid, interactive discussion of the strategic and practical challenges of university licensing. Drawing on their distinct vantage points—licensor, licensee, investor, and counsel—participants will explore how different stakeholders approach these transactions, where tensions commonly arise, and how parties can find alignment despite competing priorities. In life sciences spinoffs, the conversation will examine how startups, established companies, and universities each navigate the unique dynamics of academic licensing, from managing expectations around timelines and milestones to balancing commercial objectives with institutional mission. For high-tech and engineering spinouts, the roundtable will address how founders, investors, and technology transfer professionals work through the competing interests that shape deal structures. Rather than focusing on specific contract terms, this roundtable emphasizes the real-world negotiation dynamics and relationship-building that determine whether university innovations successfully reach the market. Whether you represent a startup seeking to license foundational university technology, an established company exploring academic partnerships, an investor evaluating spinout opportunities, or an institution looking to benchmark its licensing practices, this roundtable offers practical perspectives on navigating university licensing from every seat at the table.

With the ever-increasing number of deals within Life Sciences, it is critical to deploy good governance and oversight at each stage in the partnering lifecycle. This roundtable session will cover an overview of a typical audit approach, contractual pitfalls, and key learnings from the field.

The value of intellectual property relies on the owner’s ability to control its use and licensees’ ability to develop it in new ways. Counterfeiters undermine this value and disrupt the development of new uses. While this is clear, it is less clear how to effectively stop such theft. This roundtable examines multiple ways to fight fakes and stop counterfeiters.

This session will be moderated by Joseph Yang

FRAND determinations and royalty rates are well established for handsets. But how does rate-setting work beyond that, where value is no longer tied to devices sold, but to monthly active users or subscription revenue? What happens when license offers span multiple standards rather than a single generation? At the same time, outside the cellular world, patent ownership data is often fragmented or opaque, making it difficult to understand who owns what. This workshop will explore emerging SEP challenges and creative licensing models in a rapidly changing landscape, one shaped by industry convergence, consolidation, and value chains that increasingly cut across sectors.

This session will be moderated by Shelly Irvine

Federal funding recipients and their licensees must comply with many requirements under the Bayh-Dole Act (including timely disclosure of federally funded inventions and steps to achieve practical application). The risks of noncompliance include loss of patent rights to such inventions or government grant of a license to third parties. This affects not only federal funding recipients and licensees, but also their investors, strategic partners and acquirors. This workshop will discuss Bayh-Dole compliance practices, risks and risk mitigation strategies, diligence of IP originating from federally funded institutions, and latest U.S. government policies and practices.

This session will be moderated by Maya Elbert

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly pervasive in all aspects of life, and it’s important to understand both the opportunities and risks associated with this technology. The workshop will discuss a range of topics related to AI, including different types of AI systems and how they work, challenges in developing AI systems, and different applications of AI systems. Speakers will also present on what it means to use AI responsibly, risks associated with using AI (including bias) and best practices in managing these risks. Further, implications for Licensing of AI technologies will be considered, including what can be done to manage risks associated with using and licensing output of AI systems, and how to negotiate and manage transactions in which AI will be provided as a service.

This session will be moderated by Jason Gish

University Express Licenses are becoming more common as a solution to reducing negotiation time between start-ups and their university tech transfer offices. Many Express Licenses are only offered for certain technologies such as engineering, software, and sometimes medical devices which can sometimes be harder to license. What are the pros and cons of these licenses? Should we encourage them or not? What do the start-ups, their investors and lawyers think of them?

This session will be moderated by Katharine Ku

Some of the world’s most groundbreaking life science discoveries are conceived at educational and research institutions. Translating those discoveries from the bench to patients is one of the most challenging and improbable feats that can be accomplished by any group of people. This is especially so given the volatility of today’s environment as it relates to regulatory hurdles as well as venture and governmental funding.

In this session, the expert workshop comprised of institutional, venture, pharma, and startup representatives, will discuss this process which requires confronting the unique challenges involved in satisfying the divergent institutional and commercial interests of the key players involved. This while also focusing on the inherent positive synergies that exist in the common mission of improving healthcare for patients in need and generating the necessary revenues to justify commercial investment.

Audience Takeaways:

• Exploring the core interests of institutions, venture, pharma, and startups in the translation model
• Identifying common deal pitfalls and how to avoid them
• Managing IP risk, equity structures, and royalty models
• Examining new deal paradigms including as caused by the reduction of grant and investment funding

This session will be moderated by Dan Shores

A final evening to celebrate new connections, shared experiences, and the success of LESAM26.