Delving deeper into the IAM 250: firms and associations

Joff and Gavin of Intellectual Asset Management Magazine kindly gave me access to the data behind the IAM 250 listing that they put out in June of this year. From our earlier post on the list (and the listing of our friends and our team in it), the purpose behind the list is:

The IAM 250 is a major and unique new publication. There are any number of guides that claim to identify leading trademark, patent and copyright litigators, or IP experts in a particular field of industry. But to our knowledge, no research has previously been done specifically to identify consultants, intermediaries and financiers, as well as lawyers and attorneys, whose primary skill set is focused on helping IP owners to increase the value of their rights portfolios.

In short, this listing looks at the wider IP ecosystem rather than the narrow band of IP legal professionals, which I’ve been loosely calling the “IP services market”.

By getting access to the data from the underlying listings, I’ve been able to put some data visualisations together. Up today are word clouds using Wordle.
First up is all the firm names of everyone listed. Everyone in the IAM 250 provided employment/firm information, so this is a pretty good data set. I like this one as you can see straight away that Finnegan (5), CRA International (5), PWC (5), and RPX (4)  top the list in terms of firms.

Firms represented in the IAM 250

Large scale version IAM 250 firms.

The second is professional associations.  Association data was available only for those that went for a full profile listing in the IAM 250, and shows their self-declared memberships in professional organisations.  LES clearly dominates this space as does the AIPLA, IPO, INTA, and AIPPI.  Because many of those listed are lawyers (or have legal backgrounds) the ABA and state and local bar organisations also featured prominently.

Professional memberships of the IAM 250

Larger scale version IAM 250 memberships.

Thanks again to Joff and Gavin and the rest of the team at IAM for both producing the list and granting me access to their data.  The data and IAM 250 listing is the copyright / database rights of IAM, and the Wordle visualisation is CC-BY under their terms of use. For the curious, in order to produce these word clouds, I went through and cleaned up the data and formatted it in way that Wordle would understand, and then tweaked all the settings, colours, and other options until it looked right.

Up later this week, I spent lots of time cleaning and geocoding the IAM data to produce an interactive world map of everyone’s listing, which has turned into a pretty neat tool — hope you’ll find it useful.

Any further thoughts or analysis you’d like to see?