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Mt. Rushmore of Healthcare Corporate Venture

By Lee Drucker

Lake Whillans is excited to be part of the solution for healthcare’s next great companies. We learned that there are some big issues in the corporate VC-startup relationship. But it was exciting to see some funds have consistently earned entrepreneurs’ trust. We reviewed our research on digital health and life sciences investors again, and are excited to present four corporate funds with the most overall positive feedback from medical innovators. According to our surveys, these are the top healthcare corporate VCs.

Litigation Finance: a Symposium at NYU

By Lee Drucker

On November 20th, the Center on Civil Justice at NYU School of Law will be hosting an all-day conference, Litigation Funding: The Basics and Beyond.

To my knowledge, this is the first law school to host an in-depth conference dedicated to the subject of litigation finance, and it is a great opportunity for those interested in the topic to learn more and interact with some of the people that are currently shaping the industry.

Protecting Energy Technology

By Lee Drucker

One of the biggest challenges energy and technology companies face is protecting innovation. How do you make sure other companies or individuals don’t steal valuable new intellectual property?

Below is an article written by Deborah Huso in which Lisa Adams, partner in the IP section, and Tom Burton, chair of the energy technology practice, at Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.’s Boston offices, talk about how to make money from your innovations without risking theft or loss of proprietary technology.

Litigation Finance: Ethics Q & A

By Boaz Weinstein

I recently had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on litigation finance hosted by the Association of Business Trial Lawyers in Ojai, California. The audience was engaged and asked a variety of questions, including many on ethical considerations related to litigation finance. Since this topic seems to be top of mind for lawyers when it comes to litigation finance, we offer the following sample Q&A:

Welcome to Our Newest Team Member

By Lee Drucker

We recently hired our first full-time employee, Marla Decker, and we could not be more excited to have her as part of the team. Without further introduction, here is Marla, on how she came to join Lake Whillans, her views on litigation finance and the legal industry.

Pick the Right Lawyer for a Royalty Contract

By Lee Drucker

Role play with me for a moment. Imagine you’re going in for surgery and you can choose between two surgeons: a doctor who performs that surgery twice a year, or one that does it twice a month?

It’s a no brainer. The same should apply to lawyers – particularly when it comes to the mission-critical task of negotiating royalty contracts. These key agreements will make or break a company. Plus, if things go bad between your company and other parties, these documents will be what separates losing millions (and sometimes more) and remaining intact.

Here are some ways to vet your attorneys to see which ones know enough about royalty agreements.

Doing business with the DoD (then and now)

By Lee Drucker

Small businesses face particular challenges when endeavoring to protect their patent rights and rights to technical data. The committee report noted instances where the DoD gave another contractor access to intellectual property so they could “reverse engineer”and manufacture a patented invention. If a contractor feels his or her invention has been used unlawfully, the contractor’s only recourse, according to the report, is to sue through U.S. Federal Court –an inordinately expensive and time-consuming process.

Build a Litigation Finance Company (Part 2)

By Lee Drucker

As we continue to discuss the benefits of using litigation funding, how it can help companies grow, and how it provides new paths for entrepreneurial litigators, I have begun to explain how we at Lake Whillans think about building a quality litigation funding company. The purpose of this series of posts is to share a little about our vision of litigation finance and how we are building our company. If there are any topics that you might be curious to learn about just email me at drucker@lakewhillans.com.

In my last post on the topic, I discussed some of the less obvious benefits that are derived from selecting profitable investments. Today, I want to discuss how we think about the Lake Whillans ‘brand’.

Changing Landscape of Medtech Innovation

By Lee Drucker

Last week in Medcity News, Tiffany Wilson Karp, the executive director of the Global Center for Medical Innovation, discussed the changing landscape for early stage funding in the medical device space, including that “[v]enture capital is essentially out of the early-stage medtech investing business” and that she is “seeing an increased interest from corporate venture capital (large medical device companies, for example) which face gaps in their innovation pipelines in the future and may be open to creative ways to engage with early-stage companies who are working on problems they want to address or product pipelines they want to fill.”

Lake Whillans is NOT the Iron Bank of Braavos

By Lee Drucker

With all the hype surrounding the first episode of this season’s Game of Thrones, I figured it was time to dispel the rumors: Lake Whillans is NOT the Iron Bank. While both entities can be a great resource in your campaign to vanquish an opponent, there remain a couple key differences.