Speaker: Mr. Scott M. Frank, President and CEO – AT&T Intellectual Property

Bio:

Mr. Scott Frank was named president & CEO of AT&T Intellectual Property in March of 2007 following the December 2006 merger of AT&T and BellSouth, where he had previously been the president of Intellectual Property. Scott joined BellSouth in 1998 and led the effort in forming the BellSouth Intellectual Property companies.

When Mr. Frank started in 1998, BellSouth had less than 50 patents issued in its first 14 years and had not proactively marketed its IP. At the time of the merger, BellSouth Intellectual Property had more than 1000 patents, had been recognized by BusinessWeek for the significant value of their patent portfolio, and had added over a half billion dollars to BellSouth’s bottom-line from its IP marketing efforts.

Since 2007, Mr. Frank has led the building of a corporate-wide innovation program called The Innovation Pipeline, also known as TIP, which uses crowdsourcing to get innovative ideas from employees corporate-wide implemented quickly by AT&T. His IP organization has also grown the patent portfolio significantly to approximately 10,000 patents worldwide, and has successfully licensed and sold patents, trademarks and copyrighted technology to add hundreds of millions of dollars to AT&T’s bottom line.

Mr. Frank is a member of the Board of Directors of the Intellectual Property Owners Assoc., where he is former Chair of the Corporate IP Management Committee; Chair of the Georgia State University Law School’s Intellectual Property Advisory Board; member of the Board of Directors of the Georgia Tech Research Corporation; member of the Industry Trade Advisory Committee on Intellectual Property Rights (ITAC 15) and former Chair of the State Bar of Georgia’s Intellectual Property Law Section. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Mary Hall Freedom House, an organization that helps and rehabilitates women with substance abuse and domestic violence problems.

Prior to joining AT&T/BellSouth, Mr. Frank practiced intellectual property law in Atlanta at Troutman Sanders LLP for seven years. Prior to Troutman Sanders, he was an electrical engineer with Nortel for five years, and a computer systems analyst with AT&T for two years. 

Mr. Frank received his bachelor's in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech, and his law degree and master's in business from Georgia State University.

He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and is married with four children.