Intellectual Property Advisory Services
Kroll’s advice helps businesses worldwide protect and monetize their IP and intangible assets more effectively. We offer clear, current and informed advice across a breadth of issues around IP valuation, licensing, economics, transfer pricing and transaction advice. Our interdisciplinary team boasts expertise spanning various industries, covering IP licensing, strategy, transactions and disputes. We also offer expert witness testimony in cases centered on IP infringement.
Kroll’s Data Insights and Forensics practice focuses on due diligence during IP acquisition and creation, support in securing protection rights, managing trade secrets and cybersecurity, monitoring for IP right infringement or license misuse; and support during the compliance and renewals processes to ensure continuity of protection.
Intellectual Property Disputes and Damages Analysis
Our testifying experts support and advise clients in IP disputes and have been called on to provide independent damages analyses, expert reports and expert testimony in courts across the U.S. and Canada, at the International Trade Commission, and across global arbitration venues, including the LCIA, ICC, ICSID, SCC, HKIAC, CIETAC and SIAC.
Kroll experts are renowned for delivering analysis and testimony pivotal to the outcomes of high stakes litigation. This includes cases involving infringement of patents (including Georgia-Pacific factors for determining reasonable royalties and Panduit factors for lost profits), copyrights, trademarks and Lanham Act, trade secrets (including the UTSA) and international trade (including exclusion orders and domestic industry at the International Trade Commission).
Intellectual Property Investigations
Kroll’s IP Investigations practice provides a comprehensive approach to mitigating and responding to patent infringement, IP theft, counterfeiting, unauthorized gray market diversion, illicit trade, leaks of confidential information and misinformation/disinformation. We help companies identify threats to IP and confidential information internally and throughout their supply chain, develop the appropriate mitigation strategies and carry out IP investigations to identify suspected infringements. When infringements occur, we use the most sophisticated techniques to establish the harm inflicted.
This time last year, Rent the Runway’s fate seemed uncertain. How could a rental business built on dressing women for parties and their 9-to-5 jobs possibly survive when we were all stuck at home? But even as lockdowns extended past the one-year mark and headlines predicted “sweatpants forever,” RTR’s cofounder Jennifer Hyman believed her company wouldn’t just survive the pandemic—it would emerge stronger than ever.
COVID accelerated the value shifts Hyman has preached since Rent the Runway’s inception: that experiences and access would become more important than ownership; that sustainability would become a core consumer value; and that secondhand would quickly become a mainstream way to consume fashion, whether it’s via rental or resale. We don’t tend to think of RTR as a “resale site” or as a “secondhand fashion” purveyor, perhaps because the clothes are borrowed, not kept for years and years. But most of its garments have likely had second, third, or fourth “lives” (in contrast with the “secondhand” dress I scored on a consignment site with its tags still attached).
Subscribers have always had the option to keep items they’ve rented once they’re in their possession, usually for a fraction of the retail price. But Hyman was surprised to see that behavior double in 2020: Women who’d formerly rented a few outfits a week were now choosing select items they intended to keep forever.
That’s where she saw RTR’s pandemic opportunity. Starting today, everything on its site is available for resale, whether you’re an RTR subscriber or not. “Our goal is to be a fully circular platform where the customer has the flexibility to choose how she wants to consume our products,” Hyman says. “This is another way for customers to engage with us for the first time. There’s a very broad audience of people who want to consume secondhand, but potentially didn’t come to our platform in the past because they weren’t ready to subscribe, or they didn’t have an upcoming party or event. Now, they have the opportunity to experience the quality of our assortment, the diversity of our brands, and the incredible fashion on our platform.”
A recent survey found that 74% of Rent the Runway customers said they will likely buy secondhand in the next 12 months; when asked specifically about buying secondhand from RTR, that number jumped to 90%. The edge Rent the Runway’s resale business will have over consignment sites and vintage stores is that its products are sourced directly from brands, not customers. Rent the Runway functions like a retailer, buying collections every season and introducing new products every month. Most importantly, it offers a full range of sizes, often with hundreds or thousands of units each. (In contrast, a consignment site is more like a treasure hunt, which is appealing in an entirely different way.) “Our customer can really have the same luxury shopping experience [as any other retailer’s site], but now she’s doing it with secondhand.”