Stephen Willis specializes in intellectual property consulting, licensing, technology transfer-monetization, finance, pricing, valuation, dispute resolution, and the determination or evaluation of economic harm or damages.

Mr. Willis has been involved in hundreds of determinations or evaluations of claims for economic harm. The majority of such matters involved valuation issues concerning patents, trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights, know-how, or other intellectual property rights including some of most high-profile patent infringement matters litigated in the United States.

Mr. Willis has also served as an expert in the determination or evaluation of economic harm or damages in an array of complex and important litigation. They include such areas as antitrust, breach of contract, business interruption, product liability, environmental matters, and personal injury and wrongful death claims. Some of this expert consulting related to managing, processing, and systemizing comprehensive volumes of product liability, and personal injury and wrongful death claims asserted against Fortune 500 companies.

One environmental matter related to the economic cost of cleaning up polychlorinated biphenyls deposited into Lake Michigan by an American corporation. Another environmental matter involved the determination or evaluation of the economic harm or damages from a company’s failure to reprocess an electric utility’s spent nuclear fuel rods. This effort also included consideration of the economic cost to store such spent nuclear fuel rods indefinitely together with an array other economic issues including hazardous material cleanup cost and expense.

In addition to determining or evaluating product liability, and personal injury and wrongful death claims, Mr. Willis was responsible for working with and advising Fortune 500 companies' efforts to develop a system designed to process such claims efficiently with the expectation that the system would eliminate some of the cost and expense often duplicated from one dispute to another, as well as a number of other cost and expense reduction suggestions.

With respect to business interruption claims, Mr. Willis evaluated a number of claims asserted against the City of Chicago after the tunnels under the city flooded on April 13, 1992.

Mr. Willis is considered one of the leading intellectual property valuation experts in the world. He pioneered the application of contemporary valuation methodologies to intellectual property assets.

Mr. Willis has more than 30 years of experience valuing some of the most valuable intellectual property in the world. This includes valuing intellectual property considered to be among the most important technology breakthroughs in modern times. Also, he has negotiated the business terms and conditions of technology transfer agreements such as licenses, buy-sell agreements, and settlements of intellectual property litigation. Finally, his experience includes conducting sophisticated due diligence studies on important intellectual property assets for an array of intellectual property securitizations.

Mr. Willis is the co-chairman and founder of alseT IP Structured Finance Fund 1, which was established to securitize royalty streams generated from intellectual property with a particular focus on financing non-life science royalty streams.

He was vice chairman and one of the founders of Peterson Consulting, which is considered by most to be the first stand-alone litigation support firm in the world (Peterson Consulting is now part of Navigant Consulting.)

Mr. Willis is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified Fraud Examiner. (These licenses are currently inactive.)

Education

• Boston University
  Doctor of Arts/Humanities (not completed)
• University of Chicago Graduate School of Business
  MBA, Concentrations in Accounting and Finance, 1975
  
• University of Illinois
  B.S., 1973