Transcript for:
IP Risk Management for Canadian Manufacturers

[Music] all right well uh there's no time like the president so let's get started my name is sean casemar i want to welcome you here to another one of our engines what's next uh presentations where we bring to you cutting edge information really is the goal to help you as a canadian manufacturer navigate the environment that's out there today we have the good fortune of being joined by uh some individuals from aeon they will talk a lot about intellectual property risk management for canadian manufacturers what you need to know and most importantly how you can protect your intellectual property today's session is being recorded so we'll make sure we distribute those recordings out to you following the presentation and i'll mention just quickly as well if you have questions as we go you have two sources two solutions and you're probably familiar with them by now aren't we all you can either use the q a box and type your question in there or you can use the chat box i will be monitoring both when the presentation is done we expect it'll probably be just under an hour for the presentation then we'll launch into q a mode at which time i will ask the questions of our panel here today from aeon so make sure you capture those questions in either the q a tab or the chat tab and then i will ask those of our guests following their presentation today all right so without further ado i'm going to introduce one of our presenters uh shannon shannon shannon and she will introduce the rest of the panel uh shannon shannon is the vice president uh producer for a on the and risk management practice she currently serves focused on both manufacturing and technology sectors she's based in their toronto office and some of her areas of expertise include risk management consulting new business development and relationship management supporting initiatives for ipsolutions supporting initiatives for litigation risk and special opportunities groups as well as sales coaching so a lot of experience and very excited here to have shannon and her team join us so with that shannon i'll turn it over to you to introduce the rest of the team sean thank you so much we are um extremely grateful to you dr meyers and the whole engine team for inviting us here to talk with your members today so good afternoon to everybody we are incredibly pleased to have so many ngen members join us my name is shannon shannon um if you saw the invite and thought that there had been a typo there wasn't that's actually my name i am an insurance broker with aeon headquartered in our beautiful toronto office though not today i'm focused as sean said on the manufacturing and technology sectors and for the last two years i've been very specifically focused on helping our clients manage protect and collateralize their intellectual property having built our manufacturing practice around traditional property casualty risks that face our clients like business interruption and product liability it was really exciting for us that in 2018 aeon invested in substantial resources to address risks and opportunities in the intellectual property of our clients we started with a very strong team of about 40 people but today that group has grown into an ip practice of more than 150 colleagues with many of those being some of the world's leading ip practitioners i am extremely pleased to be joined by some of those colleagues today so peter holtz is a senior vice president at aeon he heads up our commercial ip risk division i'm also so pleased to have here two of our incredible brokers on our ip team sarah olek setzen and josh cancilipelli our ip team um we started in the u.s and to date that's where the majority of our ip leaders and brokers are but we have the capacity to work with clients globally and all of peter sarah and josh work very regularly with canadian companies in my own book of business i also straddle the border though the majority of my clients are canadian so just a little housekeeping before i turn it over to peter we do have a deck with a number of talking points that will be relevant and hopefully interesting to this audience but the very best sessions that we've ever had have been ones that are responding to real-time questions and conversations we want this to be valuable to you who are listening so we highly encourage you to interrupt interject and interact so as sean said please put your questions in the chat um if we have the ability to take you off mute i'm not sure that we do um then please raise your hand sean please interrupt me if you can hear me and that's not even a possibility um but really um like he said the question and the q a um buttons please put your questions in there we will address them as we go um we have about 45 minutes of things to talk about and we want to leave um 45 minutes for discussion so please do guide us as to what is most compelling to you and with that i will turn it over to peter to start the discussion thank you shannon and thanks everybody for joining uh thanks big thanks to uh the engine team and uh sean for for putting this on uh so as shannon said i helped lead our ip risk business here at aeon uh and i'm lucky enough that you guys don't have to listen to me talk for the full 45 minutes so um the the what we're gonna really try to dive into is very quick on who we are but really when we say ip risk how do we think about ip risk how is ip risk evolving changing what are our clients saying to us and then we're going to walk through a little bit about how do you manage ip risk right what solutions are out there in the market what does coverage look like what's the process look like and how has that changed as time's gone on and then the last thing is taking you through a few real life examples of um some ip claims that we've worked on here at iom so with that our team the shannon said 150 people i don't want to talk too much about us but i do want to highlight two things shannon said it we are predominantly based in the us we have uh members of our team all over the world however so we have colleagues in in all all over north america london bermuda and asia so we serve clients ranging from fortune 5 to pre-revenue startups and everything in between i always give the example and shannon's probably heard this far too many times um but we have clients that range from high-tech software providers technology we're using today all the way down to carpet manufacturers and everything in between um so i highlight that just to say ip is typically thought of as a high-tech um the philips the googles the microsoft's of the world ip is a risk in an asset that every one of our clients has whether you're manufacturing steel manufacturing widgets that go into led screens everybody has varying degrees of ip risk but ipris nonetheless so on the next slide we'll touch on what what do we think ip risk is and then how's it growing um so focus on the us uh candidly because there's just significantly better data and there is a correlation which i'll touch on here shortly for canadian clients but ip risk has grown pretty considerably in the last 18 to 24 months uh so we saw a really big spike in ip litigation globally as a result of cobit and we'll touch on why that is here in a second um but who has ip risk i mentioned we have a pretty broad range of clients it doesn't matter if you own patents it doesn't matter um whether or not you think you're infringing ip of third parties ip risk is really at the core uh the the risk that your uh product or service infringes third-party ip and you'll hear us say ip a lot um what do we mean by ip so the obvious one is patents right most people know what patents are um but also copyrights trademarks designs and trade secrets are becoming increasingly relevant when it comes to ip risk so every company has ip risk whether you ser provide a service a product or a combination thereof and then the last big thing is ip infringement is typically accidental most companies do not intentionally infringe third party iep the reason why there's so many ip infringement claims is because one if you've read for example a patent it's a great way to fall asleep late at night but they're very long ambiguous run-on sentences that describe an invention a design or a utility and they're very hard to say we're not infringing on that or we are infringing on that so most folks will work with outside council and do their very best to not unintentionally infringe third party but you have things like patent trolls who will just assert uh and try to get quick settlements or sometimes have material uh claims and get larger settlements you have competitor versus competitor operating company versus operating company litigation sometimes there's merit to that sometimes there's commercial motivation and then the third piece is international exposure you might be really focused on distribution and product sales in canada for example or the us but you also might sell product in europe where you either haven't done as much ip landscaping or don't have as much ip to deter competitor litigation these are all factors that drive ip risk in ip litigation the last thing is how how how catastrophic can i p issues be um so in the us for example the average ip case uh all the way through trial cost on average 3.1 million dollars um there are damage awards ranging from a million bucks all the way up to a billion dollars plus and that's not just a u.s issue so we've had claims in multiple jurisdictions and for example in europe you'd expect it to be a lot cheaper it hasn't been historically in a lot of the claims we've dealt with the next slide just looks at what i p litigation over the last few years has looked like and you'll see a huge drop in in 2015. that's predominantly because in the us uh there was a ruling the alice versus la bank ruling that made asserting software patents much more difficult but you'll see in 2020 ip litigation starting to tick upwards now why is that one um we have coveted uh and two early days of covet a lot of clients or companies thought that they were going to be entering a recession now i think today we believe we're entering a recessionary environment i think i saw something on the news that we might in the u.s at least formally be in a recession but in recessionary environments you see pretty considerable upticks in litigation we expect this to continue to increase especially as globalization continues uh as well as product innovation income industries that are starting to merge more and more with technology and digitization entering more and more unintended ip that maybe historically hasn't been an issue if you slip two slides sarah i want to touch on the economic uncertainty so this is what i was just talking about so our team a big part of our team is our data and analytics practice and what we've asked them to do is look at the last eight recessions here in the us which is as far back we have ip litigation data and in each recession there has been an uptick in ip litigation ranging from 14 to 26 again for the reasons that i said companies are trying to generate additional income potentially liquidating assets to third parties or just trying to monetize their intellectual generate additional income so one of the things and the themes that we've been seeing with our marketplace is more clients reaching out to us because of this theme right they know that maybe the good times are over we might be entering a recessionary environment and they know historically ip uh ip litigation and recessionary environments have an inverse relationship um one of the biggest drivers of of that has been here in the us but uh shannon's familiar with the fact that we've we've we have about 26 27 new accounts uh in canada in the last couple weeks alone um so it is not just a us issue although oftentimes us americans we do love to sue and people think that as a us issue we do have a lot of clients here in canada in the us in europe and as well as in parts of asia um so with that i'm very happy to say you guys don't have to hear me speak for a few more slides so i will turn it over to sarah and josh to take you through the next couple yeah thanks pete um so as pete was talking about you know patent cases in general over the past couple of years what we really wanted to look at here was okay but what does that look like specifically within the manufacturing industry um so this slide in the next we broke it down into two different revenue bands so this one is obviously on the smaller side and the next one will look at a bit bigger so as you can see even though in the past couple of years 2018 to 2020 it you see it trending downwards um although it started off very high just that you know peaked over 200 in 2013 and we're still averaging about 171 cases per year which is quite a lot um mean damages here sitting around that 8 million number um and as you can see they can go anywhere all the way up to 20.77 one thing that i want to point out before we go even further into the next slide but as pete mentioned this is us-based um purely because we have more data to draw from here but as he was saying we can draw parallels between what's happening in the us and what we can see or what we expect to see in canada especially as a result of the pandemic and you know whether or not we are entering a recession formally or informally he sarah one thing i'd add to which which i i forgot to mention but we only have sight into both formal litigation for frequency and damage awards for severity one of the big things in ip is most cases don't make their way to a formal litigation and those that do make their way to litigation often times are settled prior to a damage award so we in surveys with third party legal firms as well as there's a couple studies out there we estimate that there's about four to five x more litigations per year in every industry that are pre-litigation matters that are not reflected in this data just because they are by definition confidential yeah that's a great point i think the the exact stat is only three percent of cases actually make it through to the damages stage um so that's a good point and even with that we can take that 171 average number multiply that by four or five times and that's probably a more accurate number of how many ip issues are being handled year over year um so the next one will be quick pretty much looking um at the same thing but just with a bigger revenue band so bumping up from that 10 to 100 to the 101 billion revenue band as you can see um number of average cases is pretty much the same though those mean damages and 90th percentile damages are higher um so as you can see you know your companies are gaining more revenue they'll have more to calculate damages off of um and just reiterate it's probably a lot more than that these are just the ones that have gone through the damages um so you know this kind of wraps up our portion of trends that we're seeing overall with patent litigation ip litigation in general um in the market and specifically within the manufacturing industry which leads us to okay how can we mitigate that risk how can we get on the front end of it protect our balance sheet in case something like this does happen obviously nine times out of ten no one knows that they're infringing on someone else's ip with their products and services just because there's purely too much in the market to keep up with even if you are doing searches as you're filing for patents as you're entering new products and services into the market um and this was really the need that aeon saw when they entered this space was okay typically patents and trade secrets are excluded from every type of coverage that's out there um what you'll see the most overlap with is that fiber coverage you are afforded some trademarks some copyright coverage but it's pretty limited in nature so what ann was able to do since entering the space is really merge that gap between insurance so providing coverage for patents copyrights trademarks trade secrets on a more holistic basis and having a standalone policy to cover these costs so essentially what it is is it's a defensive policy in nature that will cover legal fees settlements and or damages that are incurred by the insured as a result of your products or your services infringing on a third party's ip whether that be their patent their copyright or their trademark another thing that it's able to do and that i typically like to break this down into three main ensuring clauses so the one that i just mentioned is ip infringement defense the second one would be indemnified party defense which we think would probably be most relevant for manufacturing clients having the ability to cover contracts that you're entering into whether it be for the development of a product or the sale of a product allowing you to transfer that risk onto the insurance market where you are indemnified or you are required to indemnify another party um and they subsequently get sued you know whether it's they're putting your product on their shelves subsequently get sued they can then turn to you and you'll have the insurance policy in the background to really pick up those costs again associated with those legal fees settlements and or damages so i typically like to think of the first two as really protecting the products and the services that you're putting out into the market which leaves us with okay how do you protect the ip that you actually own which brings us to the third element of coverage which is ip rights protection um this is intended to cover any fees associated with in in validity challenges you may get challenges to your ip rights whatever it may be so really allowing you to safeguard your own ip assets and allow you to continue in the development um of your products that you're putting out there a few other things that i'll mention um that we've been able to negotiate with markets is having competitors for both competitors or having coverage for both competitors and npes also known as non-practicing entities or patent trolls and for those of you who aren't familiar these are entities that buy up the rights to patents purely to go sue people and get settlements for these issues they are not putting any products out into the market their business is just buying things up and suing people um there is worldwide coverage available so including us canada um emea there are a few entities that are excluded now purely as a result of the political climate but we won't get into that right now as well as the insurer does have choice of counsel um for these matters and p maybe at this point i'll turn it back over to you just to add a few more things because i know we just got our new policy form approved for use in canada um walking through a bit of the extra coverages that we were able to procure yeah so thanks sarah so i think there's a couple things that add before going there one is just in terms of coverage as manufacturers in canada what what are the big things that i think to focus on so obviously sarah hit on direct infringement allegations so if you receive a threat or a formal litigation have a coverage in place to provide reimbursement for legal fees and expenses uh settlements and damages that that's the very obvious one the second area though and i think one of the big things that drives manufacturing purchases is the contractual indemnity piece so sarah and i have a few clients that are buying predominantly because they provide ip indemnities to large customers global customers and they're indemnifying either a considerable portion so a 10 or 25 million dollar cap on their indemnities or we're seeing more and more companies requesting or requiring uncapped indemnities so there's a couple pieces to that which are one do you actually have the balance sheet to stand behind that indemnity first and foremost and if not um can you have an insurance contract sit there to kind of remove that credit risk but also remove the risk that in the event your customer is sued as a result of your product or service um you don't have to take that off of your balance sheet so i just highlight that that is one of the biggest drivers in the manufacturing space of customers buying coverage um so sari mentioned we we have a couple new coverage elements that have just rolled out with some of our markets uh the first one is trade secret enforcement so if an employee of yours or a third party uh you believe has misappropriated your trade secrets you can now have coverage to provide reimbursement costs for the legal fees associated with bringing that trade secret enforcement claim similarly we're seeing more small companies call it sub 40 million dollars in revenue um able to procure i uh patent enforcement coverage so same concept on the trade secret side but for patents so if you and your outside counsel believe that a third party is infringing your intellectual property there's no coverage available to actually go and force your intellectual property the last thing i think is really important is breach of contract coverage so both breach of contract enforcement so if somebody in a contract you believe has misappropriated your intellectual property or not paid um their annual license fees uh you can enforce those or that you can bring a contract enforcement claim and similarly protect yourself in the event that one of your customers or vendors accuses you of misappropriating trade secrets that you're contractually obligated to keep either confidential or not disclosed to third parties so those are three new coverage elements again focusing on patent enforcement is one of the biggest drivers of coverage uh contractual indemnity coverage and then obviously your your straight balance sheet protection for for third-party ip issues um the last piece sarah and then i promise i'll get off my soapbox but understanding the global environment we live in more and more trade is becoming international or cross-border and understanding that canadian ip risk is one thing multiply that when you start doing business with asia europe the us becomes exponentially greater and i think is a big reason why more and more canadian clients as well as non-us clients are buying coverage at a similar if not outpaced rate to the u.s maybe this is a good place to pause and just see if the group has any questions before we go through a couple of case studies and claims examples for the group yeah so thanks peter so if you have questions you can put them in the chat box below if you prefer you can add them to the q a panel or we can probably raise them here there was a couple that came in um and i'll share one of them to begin with and it was this if a manufacturer is somewhat small so let's say they're in the the sub 10 million right they're not large they don't have any ip protection in place at all uh what is what are your recommendations around a good starting point you know as as far as putting in some basic protection for a smaller manufacturer so sean really good question um i think if you take one step back there's a misconception that if you have ip you ca if you have patents for example you're protecting yourself and you can't get sued if you have a patent on a design or a process ironically that that's not really what a patent does right a patent is is not a shield it's a sword and what what i mean by that is a patent or ip doesn't give you the right to do something it gives you the right to exclude others from doing something so for small companies especially that sub 10 25 million dollar revenue range i think there's a couple of things i'd start with first and foremost it's understanding what the contractual indemnity obligations you have your customers as first and foremost and then two looking at litigation trends in your specific product uh or or industry so our tool right now we looked at a very broad range of manufacturing clients we can actually drill down to a product level so depending on what product you're looking at we can look at who owns ip in that space uh how litigious is this and we're not going to do a freedom to operate search which has a bunch of legal ramifications we can start to kind of think about what is your risk right in a worst case scenario if somebody sues you what is your exposure look like and then we can explore transferring that to the commercial market i think one of the the nice things also about being a smaller company is you have a smaller damage base so ip risk is determined based off the alleged infringing revenue if you only have 10 million dollars your exposure is going to be relatively small which is good for two reasons one it allows you to get a program in place to protect your balance sheet early for a very affordable cost but two you don't have to buy that much limit right and if you think about what costs money and insurance it's the more insurance you buy the insurance on a 10 million dollar house is going to be a lot more expensive than a 1 million dollar house it's the same concept in ip so i think the first step sean is understand what your risk landscape looks like which is something we can help with and then the second is explore ip insurance and weigh the cost benefit of having coverage and that kind of confidence that your balance sheet won't get impacted by an ip issue versus going without coverage and the premium savings that you would you would get from that okay thanks peter um and the the second question and you've kind of addressed it here but i'll i'll ask it again just in case there's anything to add is again if i was unsure of whether i should even be protecting but you know i've been manufacturing products i've been designing them been selling them i don't even know if i should be protecting anything or even what the first step would be so never mind the landscape how would i even know if there may be some some designs products et cetera that i should actually protect is there a way to do so yeah so well i'm going to give an example and then and then i'll answer the question very bluntly um so an industry that you probably don't think has a lot of ip risk the retail industry we've seen a lot more retailers coming up for coverage and the reason for it is a lot of them have recently gotten sued because of ip pertaining to the bar code scan code thing when you check out and they pass it through and goes beep and has the price right there's a lot of ip on that retailers did not realize that or another industry where we work a lot with online retailers and there's ip around how you market uh certain things and how do you elevate certain pictures or advertisement on a page based on previous uh user experience so there's things that i in ip that aren't obvious you can build something entirely yourself not look at any third-party products and still unintentionally infringe and the reason for it is you could infringe ip that's in that industry right uh one of your direct competitors has 50 patents on this area or what more commonly happens is ancillary industries or ancillary ip that might not be directly pertaining to your manufacturing process or product could unintentionally read on that ip and that's why we've seen ip insurance as one of the best ways to mitigate ip risk where you can go hire the best law firms in the world and they'll do an incredible job but they cannot provide certainty that you're not going to one receive a case without or with merit but two they also can't guarantee what that cost would be in the event you did have one iep insurance is really the only way to give your yourself that certainty um around if there's an issue i know that as long as it costs less than this i'm good great thanks peter that's the only questions we've had come in so far awesome well i'm going to turn it over to i think josh for this next section uh to walk through a couple different case studies uh in the in the manufacturing space as well as how we've looked at portfolio programs uh for for similar type companies so with that joe thank you thanks peter uh i think this one in particular is a great example of of how iq liability is not only used to protect your assets but also leverage as a business enabler this particular example is an auto parts manufacturer they ran into a bit of a hurdle when talking with a major auto supplier and those concerns were primarily around the connect contraction with them to be sorry uh of the deal and our team here aeon was able to articulate the indemnities are in fact insurable um like sarah had mentioned and through the purchase of the itl coverage they're not only able to transfer their risk their infringement risk but as well as their contractual risk over to the insurer this decision not only uh opened up the window for them to secure their large field debate but allowed them to abort escrow and and provided peace of mind to both the supplier and manufacturer and sarah i think we jump over to the portfolio one which i find this wouldn't be quite interesting we uh we had a great opportunity to work with another canadian organization to put together a first of its kind ip liability portfolio program we had 26 participating members within this organization who could very much similarly be in the same boat as you guys were several months back where they were not too familiar with ip coverage um so through ongoing conversations we were able to articulate the importance um particularly within such a litigious and innovative space and then following those we were able to provide them with several different um coverage options from a few different insurers and it really showed the ability to tailor coverage to what really best fits you your company and or your organization such as engine once that organization was able to pin down which option best fit them we were able to save all 26 companies roughly about 30 percent in premium um and not only i was able to keep the window open for more companies to join year over year but also protect the company's assets as well as their contractual advantage i don't know if you want to jump into anything else yeah if you give me the window i'll i'll jump through it and add something um so i think this is this is really interesting so similar to how you think about group discounts if you guys were to go um for example on a vacation 10 of you guys booked the same reservation went to a travel agent and said can we get a deal it's kind of the same for ip insurance except for the technical differences the insurers are trying to diversify their pool of risk and if we can go to the market with 10 50 100 200 1 000 companies everybody in that portfolio will benefit considerably for a couple of reasons one the insurers can say with confidence that this is a diversified pool of risk and everybody will receive a considerably cheaper ip program than if they went direct to the market the second piece is it gives us more leverage with the markets given it's a larger premium amount so for example if you're paying five six thousand dollars for your ip coverage through the portfolio program and you're one off paying 10 grand for it for ip coverage the insurers have less incentive to get aggressive with pricing but also with the coverages that they provide so we were able in this program to essentially give ip enforcement coverage basically the coverage to pay for your enforcement of your rights uh for free as well as saving 30 percent on the open market opportunity that they would have had if they did not participate as part of a program so i think portfolio programs are a really interesting concept they give the entire group considerable benefit and as an individual member or contributor your benefit your coverage is going to be much cheaper and broader than it would be if you were to enter the market on an open market basis so just just to kind of hammer home that point i think portfolio programs are a really efficient way especially for smaller companies to get the best coverage possible at a much more competitive price sarah are you going to take us through these claims examples next i sure am um so after all that talk about how great the coverage is we thought we would provide you with a few examples of how exactly it works um so this was a client that we had ultimately paid out 500k on their claim they were a high-tech manufacturing company around 250 250 million annual revenues um growing quickly over the next couple of years through contracts and um internal business development so they were actually sued by a non-practicing entity rather than a competitor um they were very active in the technology space they had been suing several of their competitors over the couple of years however the client didn't see it coming and ultimately what we were able to do um over the long process of about eight months going back and forth in negotiations um between the company and the npe and also keeping the insurers in the loop um was they were able to lean on their um ip liability policy that they had placed um years prior and just kept renewing so they had a 10 million limit with a 250 k retention per claim so ultimately once they paid that first 250 k um with you know through their retention they the insurance market paid out an additional 100 and then 400 for the actual settlement that they agreed to with the npe um so really just wanted to highlight how the insurance actually works what the process looks like when a claim does come in um how you notice the insurer and the process for keeping them in the loop um and ultimately just showing that the insurance does work um pete josh anything to add there we have one more example that's pretty similar no i think the one thing i'd highlight is this is a slightly larger client than i think the the average engine client but one of the other benefits is especially as a younger company if you don't have for example a dedicated legal team or you might not have as much experience in ip litigation or ip litigation in different geographies the the insurance process you get to run but there are insurance resources available to provide kind of thoughts on hey if you need counsel here's who we know has been successful in the space previously or here are typical next steps we have a claims team of about 35 litigation or coverage litigators on our team that advocate on your behalf with the insurers and we have 150 people on our ip team who can provide resources help and advice throughout the process so it's a kind of non-financial benefit of coverage especially as a young company to work through some of these processes that you may not have experience or expertise in today and likely will in the future yeah pete and i think this this next case study really exemplifies that so this one was a pre-ipo company um and we do have statistics which we didn't include in this presentation but we do work with pre-ipo companies and we've done some research basically showing that in the years leading up to in a couple of years after company ipos they actually do see a spike in litigation purely because their name is in the press more and more people are becoming aware of their products and their technology that they're putting out there um so as companies think about you know nearing an ipo they really should have coverage in place whether they um and i'm sure no one thinks that they are infringing on anyone else's ip but really just adding that extra layer of protection to have that insurance policy sit there and as you can see in this case um the insurance ultimately did pay a large settlement amount along with um some legal fees so this was especially important for that pre-ipo company that didn't may not have necessarily had all of that cash laying around to pay out on a claim like this um really just having that help protect their balance sheet in this case and i believe um this is the last slide that we have really just wanted to end with some claims examples so um pete or josh shannon if you don't have anything to add i think we're okay to open it up for questions at this stage yeah sarah i know there is one question and i'm looking forward to having one of you guys answer it but i was just thinking when you were talking about this claims slide that maybe one of the things we didn't put in a slide um into our presentation is really the cost of um ip coverage so i'm particularly interested i mean of course we won't have data that we can share on what this particular pre-ipo manufacturer was paying for premiums but maybe you could just talk at a very high level about what what the cost of coverage coverages yeah sure um and me i'm not sure if any of you have explored ip insurance in the past but um the story we typically like to tell is if you were to look at it five even three years ago before ann was able to enter the space was uh coverage was typically priced too expensive and was too limited to really make sense for people to buy um so since we've been working with insurers getting them more comfortable with uh ip as a risk and an asset class we've been able to bring that pricing down to around one to three percent um rate online um np i'm sure you know we've seen recently in some cases even less than one percent for those really small not as risky companies the biggest driver the biggest differences that we'll see are across industries so tech large tech clients tend to be more expensive but the biggest thing i think that we've seen lately is as long as a company hasn't been involved in litigation in the past or it hasn't been very costly we typically see it in that one to two percent range and the great thing about this coverage is it gives us the ability to really tailor it over time so maybe for those smaller companies um looking to get coverage in place now really just have it as some layer of protection get it priced now at around one to two percent for maybe three million in limits and then as you grow and your business evolves over the next couple of years we can look to increase those limits and right-size the program with the retention and co-insurance and coverages and all of that um you took yourself off me so i'm i'm thinking you have something to add no well yes i i think you ate the nail in the head i would say for smaller clients particularly in canada we would expect that rate to be one percent or some one percent um again just there is a difference in risk and one of the biggest benefits of being a canadian client is we get to tell insurers that you don't predominantly do business in the us and that has a material premium saving opportunity there so for example i know a bunch of our canadian clients have a rate closer to seven point seven percent uh so put that in real terms if you buy a million dollars of coverage that's about seven thousand dollars in premium and just to confirm um that that's if an individual company is going to the markets themselves right it's it's outside of a portfolio program and the reason i would expect 20 savings to 40 savings is part of a broader portfolio thanks peter and the only reason i wanted to clarify that is because um jay myers and the engine team were at very early stages of talking about it but that is actually how i got introduced to engen is because it is a portfolio program is a consideration for um foreign gen members so stay tuned on that great peter you're muted i think i'm not sure there you go that would help i do see a question from dileep um so the question is when handling an npe based claim do you simply look at the end of process and limit exposure or do you promote positions by trying to invalidate ip assets owned by the npe that is a great question so part of the defense provisions in the policy is you get to drive the litigation as you commercially would and what we mean by that is things like counter claims or one-on-one challenges or invalidity challenges are all covered actions under the policy so you would take essentially what you think is in the best interest of your business and you could manage the claim that way so real example if you were sued by a patent troll and let's say the patent has not yet been challenged you could try to invalidate the patent or if it's a ten thousand twenty thousand dollar settlement offer the commercially reasonable response would be to just pay the 10 or 20 000 instead of potentially the 100 or 200 000 for the invalidity proceedings so it really is up to both there is a requirement to get the insured insurer's consent but it really is what's the most commercial route for you and what's the most commercially available uh solution to mitigate this is that any any follow-on no no that's okay i just entered into the uh chat panel if there are other questions now is your opportunity uh please enter them into the q a panel you can enter them in the chat whatever works most appropriately for you and i'm going to assume because there's no follow-up that you answered that question well so we'll just give it another minute or so here to see if there's other questions and then we'll turn it back to turn back to maybe yourself peter for some closing contaction okay for some closing comments so again any questions at all feel free to um enter them in the q a box or into the chat panel make sure we answer them if you have questions that come up post this event so something comes to mind after we're done here if you want to send them back when you receive the recording just reply with your question and we will get that over to shannon and the team here to to address it as well and uh be able to circle back that way all right so this doesn't look like there's any further questions so shannon i'll turn it back to you to uh for closing comments yeah thanks sean um this is the quietest group i think that we've had around ip i'm going to take it to to mean that everyone on this call is an ip expert but as sean said whether or not you are a current client of aeon or not we are extremely um happy to answer questions that you have or talk about your ip strategy at a very high level so um like sean said he's going to be sending out the recording um and we can connect connect with myself or peter sarah josh on linkedin if it's helpful we would be um delighted to talk through your ip strategy with you and once again sean extremely grateful to you and to kim today for letting us speak to your members that's great well i want to thank you all for taking time out of your busy days to join us uh obviously when it comes to engine and our members uh ip is important hence why we've had a number of people here joining us today and uh we look forward to future communications so that we can share that with our members and protect everyone's ip so that we can continue to advance manufacturing in canada so again thank you everybody from aon today for joining us thank you to all of our guests who participated and joined us here today we will send this recording out and watch for us we're going to take a little bit of a break in august here just because of a lot of people away in holidays we realize but watch your mail for september's event mr peter hall will be coming back i think it's september 15th but don't quote me watch your mail he's going to be doing an economic update with what's happening uh so stay tuned for that it's gonna be very exciting thanks again to our panelists thanks again for you uh to joining us here today look forward to seeing everybody again soon take care thanks sean thank you team thanks everyone