Many IP professionals are by now aware that visibility is essential for business growth. But before deciding what to say, where to appear or how frequently to communicate, there is a more fundamental question:

What should make your expertise particularly relevant to the clients you want to work with?

Positioning is used frequently and defined rarely. In conversations around experts and professional services, it can mean many different things. Finding a niche. Improving a LinkedIn profile. Becoming better known for a particular topic. Developing a clearer message. Becoming more visible. All of these can become relevant. But they come later. I have spent many years developing positioning and communication strategies for major brands and businesses, often in markets where several strong competitors appeared to offer very similar things. One lesson has remained remarkably consistent: quality alone does not tell the market what to choose you for.

The same challenge increasingly applies to expert-led businesses. For an IP firm or individual expert, positioning means creating a clear connection between what you are particularly equipped to contribute, the situations in which that contribution becomes valuable to clients, the alternatives those clients could choose instead and the reason your perspective deserves consideration. It requires more thought than rewriting a profile or posting more on LinkedIn. Because positioning begins much earlier: with deciding what you want your expertise to mean in the market.

Expertise is the foundation, but the client sees a situation

Expert-led businesses naturally describe themselves through their expertise. A patent attorney may talk about technical qualifications, industries, jurisdictions and years of experience. A firm may highlight the expertise of its partners, its international network, the breadth of its services or its track record in complex cases. These are important signals. They help establish credibility and reassure clients that they are dealing with capable professionals. But they do not automatically tell a prospective client why that particular expertise matters to them.

The client sees the world differently. They may be preparing to enter a new market and want to understand where IP could create risk or opportunity. A technology may be moving from development towards commercial scale and questions around ownership, know-how and competitive protection are becoming more important. A collaboration that originally looked straightforward may suddenly involve difficult questions about who controls what. A competitor may have made a move that management does not yet know how to interpret. Or a growing company may realise that important knowledge exists across different teams without having a clear understanding of which parts create competitive advantage and how well they are protected. The starting point is therefore usually not the expert’s professional category. It is the client’s situation. And that difference is central to positioning.

If a company is facing one of those situations, the question is unlikely to be: “Which advisor has the broadest description of their expertise?”

It is much closer to: “Who understands what is happening here, what is at stake for us and how we should approach it?”

A strong positioning helps your expertise enter that conversation and connects what you know with why it matters. I often see a gap in expert businesses. Internally, the expertise may be perfectly clear. The partners know what the firm is exceptionally good at. Existing clients have experienced the quality of the work. Colleagues in the profession may recognise the depth of someone’s knowledge immediately.

Someone encountering the expert from outside has none of that experience. They see a website, a biography, perhaps a conference presentation or LinkedIn profile. They might hear the expert speak on a panel or receive a recommendation from somebody they trust. From these fragments, they have to understand whether this person or firm might be relevant to the problem they are facing. That requires translation: not simplification of the expertise itself, but greater clarity about where that expertise creates value.

Consider the difference between saying, “We advise clients on patents, trademarks, licensing and IP strategy across multiple jurisdictions,” and “we help technology companies understand how to protect competitive advantage as their innovation moves towards commercialisation”. The first tells us what the firm does. The second starts helping a particular client understand when the firm could matter.

The underlying expertise may be similar. The way the market can interpret it is very different. This is why positioning is much more than finding attractive words for an existing service description. It asks you to look at your expertise through the eyes of the people who may eventually need it. What are they trying to achieve? What is changing in their business? What risks are they beginning to notice? Which questions become difficult enough that external expertise suddenly becomes valuable? And where does your particular combination of knowledge, experience and perspective help them see or do something better?

The answers create the connection between professional capability and client relevance.

Your alternatives may not look like you

Positioning always exists in relation to alternatives. For a patent law firm, it may be tempting to think primarily about other patent law firms. For an IP consultancy, competitors may appear to be other IP consultancies. That’s understandable from inside the profession. Clients often see a broader picture. Depending on the situation, they might involve their internal legal or IP team. They could turn to a management consultancy, another type of legal advisor or a specialised technology provider. They might use AI-supported tools to address parts of the question themselves. They may postpone the decision because the issue does not yet seem urgent enough to justify external support.

Sometimes the strongest alternative is simply doing nothing. This changes the positioning question.
You are not only trying to explain why you are different from another expert who looks similar on paper. You also need to make the value of involving you understandable compared with the other ways the client could approach the situation. Imagine, for example, that a technology company is preparing for rapid international growth. The management team might initially see IP as one technical or legal workstream among many. An IP advisor who communicates primarily through professional credentials and a list of services may be credible, but may remain peripheral to the business discussion.

Another advisor may have become clearly associated with helping technology businesses understand which intellectual assets need particular attention before expansion creates new dependencies, exposures or competitive risks. The second advisor has made it easier for management to understand why IP expertise belongs in the conversation at that moment. That is an important part of positioning. It influences not only who clients consider, but also whether they recognise the need for your expertise early enough to involve you at all.

Why more visibility doesn’t necessarily solve the problem

When business development becomes difficult, visibility is an understandable response. A firm may become more active on LinkedIn, rewrite its website, publish more content or increase its presence at conferences. Any of these can be useful, but there is a risk in starting there. If the market doesn’t yet have a clear reason to associate you with something particularly relevant, more communication may simply make the same ambiguity more visible to more people.

The real question comes earlier. What should people understand about you once they encounter you? Under which circumstances should your name come back to mind? What business problem, transition or decision should create the thought: “This is someone we should involve”?

These questions belong to positioning. Once they have strong answers, communication becomes far more purposeful. Your profile can express the position more clearly. Thought leadership can reinforce the perspective you want to become known for. Case studies can demonstrate that you have already dealt with the kinds of situations you want clients to associate with you. Conference topics become easier to choose because you know which conversations support the expertise you want to make visible. The communication channels are still important. But they are carrying a strategic decision rather than trying to create one.

Positioning does not mean reducing everything you can do

For experienced experts, there is often another concern: If I position myself around particular situations or problems, do I risk appearing narrower than I really am?

This is a very legitimate question. Senior professionals often have broad capabilities because their careers have developed over many years. They may advise different industries, solve different kinds of problems and contribute at different stages of a client’s development. A firm may also depend economically on several areas of work. Strong positioning doesn’t require denying that breadth. But it does require creating orientation.

Think about the difference between everything an expert can do and what the market should most strongly associate with that expert. Those two things don’t need to be identical. An experienced IP professional may be able to handle a broad range of questions while developing a particularly strong reputation around helping companies navigate collaborations in which technology, know-how and ownership are strategically intertwined. Another may become especially relevant to companies moving from research and development towards commercial scale. Another may be recognised for helping senior management understand how IP affects business decisions rather than treating it mainly as a legal protection mechanism. None of these positions needs to describe the entirety of the expert’s capabilities. Their purpose is to give the market a meaningful point of entry. The depth remains behind it.

Positioning helps people make sense of expertise before they experience it

I’ve already written about why good work no longer speaks clearly enough on its own. About why experts sometimes need to make more of their thinking visible. About the difference between being professionally respected and being chosen by a client. These are related problems. Existing clients can judge your expertise from experience. Prospective clients cannot. Before they work with you, much of what makes you valuable is invisible.

They don’t yet know how you approach a difficult conversation. They haven’t experienced your ability to connect legal, technical and commercial questions. They cannot know how quickly you identify what really matters in a complicated situation. They haven’t seen the quality of the questions you ask or your ability to challenge an assumption at exactly the right moment. They have to make an initial judgement from limited evidence. Positioning helps organise that evidence. It creates a clearer picture of where you fit, why your expertise might matter and under which circumstances it makes sense to take the next step and speak to you.

This is particularly important as expertise becomes easier to access. Information that once required specialist knowledge may increasingly be available through technology. Potential clients can research firms and professionals internationally within minutes. Many experts publish valuable content. Claims such as “experienced”, “international”, “client-focused” or “strategic” appear across countless professional profiles. Under those conditions, credibility remains essential. But credibility alone gives clients many credible options.
Positioning helps clients understand why one of those credible options may be more relevant to their particular situation.

A useful test

I often find a simple test revealing when working with IP experts:

Imagine a prospective client who has never worked with you and knows relatively little about your profession.
They encounter your website, your LinkedIn profile or perhaps something you have written. After a few minutes, could they explain to someone else when involving you would make particular sense, what you bring to that situation and why that might matter compared with the alternatives?

If the answer remains vague, the issue may not primarily be visibility. The market may simply lack a clear way of interpreting the expertise it sees. And that brings us to perhaps the hardest part of positioning. Experts accumulate value over time: more knowledge, more cases, more experience, more sectors, more qualifications, more sophisticated ways of thinking. Positioning asks them to interpret that accumulated value and determine which parts should become especially meaningful to the market.

Eventually, that requires choice. Because the market cannot remember the complete depth of your expertise, your entire professional history and every service you could potentially provide. It needs a clearer reason to know when to think of you. That is what positioning should provide.

In the next column, I will look more closely at one of the most difficult implications of this: why good positioning requires choices, and why trying to preserve every possible option can make an expert harder rather than easier to choose.

Until then, a question to reflect on:

If a potential client encountered your business for the first time today, would they understand the situation in which your expertise becomes particularly valuable, or mainly see a list of everything you are capable of doing?

Giulia Donato
Brand & Communication Strategy Consultant | Executive Coach | Adjunct Professorpeople & brand strategies

www.donatostrategies.com