Picture this: You’re at a yacht party (stay with us here), and you meet a business owner who casually mentions he budgets $30,000 every month just to chase down people stealing his intellectual property. Thirty thousand dollars. Every month. Just to play defense against thieves.

This scenario, shared by one of our Wisdom Collection contributors, perfectly illustrates the expensive reality that attorney Vickie Molenda sees every day. In her chapter “Go On the Offense with Intellectual Property,” Vickie reveals a startling truth: most business owners are approaching IP protection completely backward.

The Problem with Playing Defense

“Usually it’s after a problem has already arisen,” Vickie explains about when clients first contact her. “They come when they find out someone’s already infringing their patent or copying their work product. Then it’s much harder to go after people, it costs a lot more money instead of taking the time to do things earlier.”

Or worse, they rush to patent everything without understanding whether a patent is even the right protection for their situation. “They just have the ‘oh, I have an invention, I need to go patent it’ mindset,” she says. “And then they spend a lot of money for it. And maybe they didn’t really need that.”

The Hidden Costs of Poor IP Strategy

The financial impact extends far beyond monthly enforcement budgets. Vickie sees business owners discover too late that they don’t know the true value of their company when it’s time to sell. “They haven’t taken the time to inventory or keep track of their IP as they go along,” she notes. “You’re not getting the full value you could have, or you realize that something really shouldn’t have gone with that business because it really belongs with the business you’re retaining.”

Breaking Out of the IP Bubble

As a scientist-turned-lawyer, Vickie understands that intellectual property often feels like the domain of “nerds in the corner.” That’s exactly why she contributed to The Wisdom Collection—to break out of her “attorney intellectual property bubble” and reach entrepreneurs who don’t yet realize they need this expertise.

“It’s like marketing and finance,” she explains. “You just understand the basics of finance without having to be a CPA. Really, it helps a lot with just understanding what you need to do with your business and taking the precautions that end up being problems down the road.”

The Offensive Strategy

Vickie’s approach is refreshingly proactive. She advocates bringing IP attorneys into the development process early, not just at the end. “They should go to their attorney early in the process when they’re in the middle of development so that they can help them with what kind of tests would help them get a better, stronger patent if they do decide to go that route.”

But perhaps most intriguingly, she reveals how IP can be used for competitive intelligence: “You can figure out what your competitors are doing by looking at their IP, even before they actually announce it or do it.”

Making IP Accessible

Vickie’s ultimate goal is ambitious but necessary: she believes IP strategy should be taught in business schools alongside marketing and finance. “IP should be taught in business as a course,” she insists, “because if they’re already thinking about starting businesses, they need to know this.”

Her chapter in The Wisdom Collection serves as an introduction—a way to “pique people’s interest in why they should start digging deeper.” For readers ready to take the next step, she’s developing a comprehensive playbook covering everything from day-one protection strategies to using competitor IP for market intelligence.

The Wisdom Collection is available now, featuring Vickie Molenda’s essential guide to IP strategy alongside insights from 18 other contributors who’ve transformed their professional expertise into wisdom worth sharing.