MWA - Merlin Wright Associates

Leadership transitions at the top of an IP function are rarely orderly. How you respond in the first weeks can define the trajectory of the department.

It doesn’t matter how it happened. A surprise resignation on a Monday morning. A termination following a difficult board conversation. A sudden bereavement. The result is the same: one of the most specialised, relationship-dependent, operationally critical roles in the business is empty.

Patent prosecution deadlines don’t pause. Licensing negotiations don’t pause. The litigation you’ve been quietly managing certainly doesn’t pause. And the rest of the IP team, often a small, tight-knit group, is watching to see how leadership responds.

“The instinct is to move fast. Fill the seat, restore normality, signal control. That instinct is right but only if channelled carefully.”

Interim solutions have become an increasingly credible and sophisticated answer to this moment. A well-placed interim Head of IP can stabilise a department within days, preserve institutional knowledge, maintain external relationships, and create the breathing room needed to make a considered permanent appointment. Done well, an interim engagement is not a stopgap but a strategic intervention.

If not done well, strategic decisions can stall, people from within the department leave, and interim hires shift their focus to short-term performance.

An example of when it goes well: A global consumer electronics company lost its VP of IP mid-litigation. An interim with direct litigation management experience was placed within ten days. They held the external counsel relationships, kept the legal strategy on track, and delivered a full brief to the incoming permanent hire four months later.

When appointing an interim appointment, you need to carefully consider the following questions:

What will be the interim’s mandate? It is important to have clarity on this. Is their remit to maintain stability or make unpopular but necessary calls?

Where will the interim come from? Sometimes it works that you appoint an internal interim from the team. If succession planning has been established in the department, this can provide the least upheaval. We have seen this many times in departments in this scenario and it works well. However, the downside to this is the expectation that the interim starts to view the role as their own permanent position and will approach the role with a different lens. Going external can help to maintain balance and objectivity when it comes to finally making the permanent hire. We carried out a confidential search for a German company with this approach in mind. The outcome led to an internal appointment but it allowed the department to approach this search in a calm, methodical way.

Should an interim appointment be a try-out for the permanent job? If looking externally, is the back-up option to consider the person as the eventual permanent hire? In our experience, this does not work well. We have found that it can send confusing messages to the department as well as creating ‘noise’ around the interim’s remit. Furthermore, we find that interim leaders are often set up in this way and are not looking for a permanent position.

Where we come in

We have been involved in a number of interim IP leadership engagements, and the pattern we see most clearly is this: the organisations that get the best outcomes are those that treat the interim period as an active phase, not a passive one. They appoint with intent.

Across our assignments, the mandates have broadly fallen into four categories – and the most successful engagements are those where the purpose is named clearly from day one.

• Regaining Stability: Restoring operational confidence and team morale when a sudden departure has created uncertainty, backlog, or a loss of direction.
• Transforming the function: Using the leadership transition as a deliberate catalyst: restructuring, modernising, or repositioning the IP department for the business it needs to serve.
• Building the roadmap: Creating a detailed strategic brief and operational framework that the incoming permanent leader can inherit, so they land running, not orienting.
• Succession planning: Identifying and developing internal talent so that the next transition, planned or otherwise, doesn’t leave the organisation exposed in the same way.

A leadership gap at the top of your IP function is a genuinely high-stakes moment. But it is also, with the right support, a moment of possibility. The question isn’t just how quickly you can fill the seat. It’s what you want the person who fills it permanently to walk into.

We’re happy to have that conversation at whatever stage you’re at.