Global Rights Management, LLC (“GRM”) is headquartered in Santa Barbara, California. It was founded in 2009 by Michael Purvis, an intellectual property and business attorney with over 25 years of experience. Mr. Purvis started as a litigator and then worked in-house as a transactional attorney for a variety of major U.S. corporations including The Walt Disney Company, British Petroleum, the Viacom Retail Group and JAKKS Pacific (the fourth largest toy company in the U.S.). He has extensive experience in the entertainment and toy industries, and recognized expertise in intellectual property law, consumer products, marketing and promotions, and negotiations.

Mr. Purvis formed GRM to meet three significant challenges facing rights holders with respect to the management of intangible assets (iAssets).

• First, a vast amount of value within iAssets produced by small and large corporations, individuals and universities is either not being recognized at all, or is not being monetized to its maximum potential value.  Often there is no one within these organizations who focuses on the true value of the entire iAsset portfolio or who is tasked with aggressively pursuing opportunities to monetize that portfolio. This is usually due either to a lack of in-house personnel with expertise in iAssets or a lack of time available for personnel to address anything other than normal daily operations.

   

• Second, there are virtually no other firms that choose to offer full service iAsset management services, or have the expertise and skills to do so.  Most of the firms in this field tend to be very small, have no ready access to a broad range of licensing, marketing and legal expertise, limit their services to one particular class of iAssets (e.g., trademarks), and usually only represent Fortune 100 companies.  This forces rights holders to rely upon smaller firms with limited expertise, limits the access of rights holders who are not major established companies, requires a rights holder to retain multiple vendors, and makes the management of the rights holder’s overall iAsset portfolio much more difficult and expensive.

   

• Third, even merely “adequate” management of iAssets has been cost prohibitive.  This arises from the traditional bifurcated approach to the management of iAssets.  On the one hand, rights holders have hired law firms to secure iAsset rights, protect them, and enforce them.  But these services are provided at very expensive hourly billing rates and focus exclusively on the legal issues -- not on monetizing the iAssets.  On the other hand, the rights holder often can’t afford to hire a licensing agency to attempt to monetize its iAssets because of the manner in which licensing agency fees are structured and the hesitancy of such agencies to represent anything other than a brand that is already well established.  Until now, most rights holders simply couldn’t afford to engage an effective iAsset management firm.

GRM offers its clients an opportunity to meet each of the above challenges by outsourcing their iAsset management needs to GRM.  GRM utilizes the experience and talent of teams of entrepreneurial attorneys, licensing and marketing professionals, and other professionals with specialized skills to provide services to its clients.  Each team is formed to meet the specific needs of an individual client.  These professionals draw upon their experience, skills, and network of contacts to offer GRM’s clients the highest quality advice and services.   GRM also offers its clients a dramatically lower cost structure for the management of iAssets.  While the company tailors its fees to each situation, GRM often represents clients on a “pay for performance” basis (i.e., on a commission basis) or on a flat fee basis.  Most of GRM’s services are not billed on an hourly basis.  GRM’s innovative fee plans offer its clients a low-cost way to monetize the value of their iAssets.