Fractional IP Counsel
Your engineering team is filing invention disclosures faster than anyone is turning them into strategy. Your board is asking what your patent portfolio is actually worth going into the next round. And you're not yet at the size where a full-time general counsel or in-house IP attorney makes financial sense.
Fractional IP counsel closes that gap. You get a senior patent attorney who works as an extension of your leadership team on a defined, ongoing basis, reviewing invention disclosures, shaping filing strategy, sitting in on Board conversations about IP value, and coordinating the outside prosecution work that's already underway, without adding a six-figure salary line before you're ready for one.
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At Evergreen Valley Law Group, this isn't a side offering bolted onto a general practice. It's the work our founder does directly, and it's informed by sitting on both sides of the table: as patent counsel to technology companies and as an active investor who has evaluated IP as part of deal diligence herself.
What Is Fractional IP Counsel?
Fractional IP counsel is an arrangement where an experienced patent attorney takes on an ongoing, part-time role inside your company reviewing IP decisions, setting filing strategy, and reporting to your leadership or board instead of billing hourly for one-off matters or joining as a full-time employee.
The difference between EVLG’s fractional IP counsel and traditional outside counsel is continuity. A law firm you call only when a matter comes up doesn't build you a running picture of your portfolio, your product roadmap, or what your competitors are filing. Fractional counsel does, because the engagement is ongoing rather than transactional.
The difference from a full-time in-house hire is cost and flexibility. A senior in-house patent attorney in Silicon Valley is a high fixed cost before a company has enough IP volume to keep that person fully utilised. Fractional counsel scales with actual need, providing more involvement ahead of a funding round or acquisition conversation and less during quieter periods, without a hiring or termination decision either way.
Fractional IP Counsel vs. Fractional General Counsel
These two get confused often enough that it's worth separating the two clearly, especially if you're comparing providers.
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A fractional general counsel covers the full range of a startup's legal needs: commercial contracts, employment matters, corporate governance, and fundraising documents, with intellectual property as one piece of a much broader mandate. A fractional IP counsel is a specialist: the entire engagement is built around your patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, along with the strategy connecting them to product and fundraising decisions.
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Many funded startups end up with both, and they work best in coordination, rather than in place of one another. A fractional general counsel manages your legal function broadly; fractional IP counsel goes deeper on the technical and strategic patent work most generalist attorneys aren't equipped to do, including claim scope, prior art positioning, and portfolio strategy that holds up under investor or acquirer diligence.
When Does a Startup Need Fractional IP Counsel?
There's rarely one single trigger. In practice, most companies bring on fractional IP counsel to address one of a few points:
01.
You're generating more invention disclosures than you can evaluate
Once an engineering team begins shipping regularly, disclosures start piling up faster than a founder or part-time outside counsel can triage them for patentability and business value.
02.
You're heading into a funding round or acquisition conversation
Investors and acquirers increasingly treat the IP portfolio as a diligence item, not an afterthought. Gaps in inventorship documentation, weak claim language, or an unclear ownership chain are the kinds of things that surface late and slow a deal down.
03.
You have a patent budget, but no one setting the strategy behind it
Filing patents without a coordinated strategy tends to produce a portfolio that's expensive, defensively weak, broad enough to cost money, and not specific enough to hold up.
04.
You're expanding into new technical areas or new markets
AI-enabled products, hardware with new supply chains, or international expansion into markets like India raise IP questions a generalist attorney typically hasn't dealt with before.
05.
You have in-house legal, but not IP-specific, expertise
A general counsel or first legal hire at a startup is rarely a patent attorney. EVLG’s fractional IP counsel fills that specific gap without requiring a second full-time hire.
What EVLG's Fractional IP Counsel Covers
The scope is built around your company's actual stage and technical focus, rather than a fixed package, and typically includes:
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Invention disclosure review and triage: evaluating what's worth filing, what's better protected as a trade secret, and what isn't worth the spend yet.
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Patent portfolio strategy: building a filing roadmap tied to your product roadmap and what competitors are doing, not just responding to whatever engineers bring in.
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Prosecution oversight: coordinating and reviewing the work of prosecution counsel (including EVLG's own drafting and prosecution team) so applications stay aligned with your strategy through USPTO examination.
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Board and investor reporting: translating portfolio status into language a Board or investor can actually evaluate, as a standing agenda item or ahead of a raise.
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Diligence preparation: cleaning up inventorship records, assignment documentation, and ownership chains before they're reviewed by outside counsel on the other side of a deal.
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Freedom-to-operate and competitive monitoring input: flagging where a product direction may run into someone else's patent rights, and where competitors are filing.
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Licensing and IP monetization guidance: evaluating whether parts of the portfolio are worth licensing out, in, or holding.
How the Engagement
Works
Fractional IP counsel is typically structured as an ongoing monthly retainer rather than hourly billing, so you have predictable access to counsel instead of hesitating to pick up the phone. The exact scope, hours committed, cadence of check-ins, and level of Board involvement are set based on your company's size and filing volume, and where you are relative to a funding event.
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Most engagements start with a short assessment of your existing portfolio and open matters, ensuring that the attorney isn't starting from zero on strategy conversations. From there, the relationship runs on a regular cadence, commonly monthly or biweekly check-ins, with additional availability around specific events like a Board meeting, a term sheet, or a due diligence request.
San Jose Strategy, Bangalore Execution
EVLG runs its fractional IP counsel engagements across two offices by design. Strategy, client relationships, and USPTO-facing work run out of the San Jose office, in the center of the Silicon Valley companies the firm serves. Prior art searches, competitive intelligence, and Indian patent and trademark filings run through the firm's Bangalore office, Epiphany IP Solutions.
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For a startup with an India-based engineering or R&D team, or one weighing where to file internationally, this isn't a convenience feature; it is direct operational capability in both markets rather than a referral to a partner firm neither side has vetted.
Why Founders and Boards Choose EVLG
Kanika Radhakrishnan, EVLG's founder and Managing Shareholder, personally leads the firm's fractional IP counsel work. Kanika is a Harvard-trained patent attorney and former patent litigator at Morrison & Foerster, and she brings a perspective most patent attorneys don't have: she's also an active early-stage investor who has backed more than 25 deep tech companies across the U.S., India, and Europe, with portfolio exits contributing to more than $1.1 billion in combined value.
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That investor-side experience changes how she advises founders. Kanika has evaluated other companies' intellectual property as part of her own due diligence process, so the guidance she gives startups on filing strategy and portfolio positioning reflects what she's seen matter when a deal is actually being decided.
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Kanika currently works with AI companies on questions the field is still debating, including what's patentable in a model-based product and how training data provenance affects defensibility. She also advises accelerators, incubators, and early-stage venture funds on IP defensibility as part of their own investment diligence.
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Across the firm, EVLG has overseen more than 5,000 patent filings with an 87% grant rate, for clients working in semiconductor, photonics, AI infrastructure, robotics, defense, and EV technology—the kind of hardware- and deep-tech-heavy work that requires a patent attorney who understands the underlying technology, not just the legal side.
Industries We Work With
EVLG's fractional IP counsel clients are concentrated in technical sectors where patent strategy is inseparable from product strategy: semiconductor and chip design, photonics, AI infrastructure and AI-enabled products, robotics, defense technology, and electric vehicle technology. If your company sits in one of these areas, the EVLG attorney advising you already understands the technology behind your product, not just the filing process.