What do patents, trade marks, and design rights have to do with a better golf shot, a stronger barbell, and why does independent IP strategy, grounded in trusted relationships, make the difference between success and failure?
Discussions of IP in sport often centre on logos, licensing programmes, media rights and sponsorship deals. For IP practitioners, however, the more interesting story is often found behind the scenes in the R&D, product development and enforcement strategies that create, protect and sustain competitive advantage throughout the product lifecycle.
That is the territory explored in an episode of FICPI Focus 45, where Louis DiSanto, Partner at Banner Witcoff in Chicago, joined host Louis-Pierre Gravelle, Partner at Dipchand LLP in Toronto, FICPI Focus 45 host, and Deputy Secretary General of FICPI International. Recorded to mark World IP Day on 26 April 2026, with the theme of sports and IP, the conversation offers a practitioner-to-practitioner discussion about incremental innovation, proportionate enforcement, disciplined international filing, and the trusted relationships that allow IP advice to be commercially effective.
Incremental innovation and the commodity problem
Louis’s route into sports IP will sound familiar to many practitioners. A senior partner asked whether he had capacity. The client was Nike. The product was golf balls. From there, his practice expanded to fitness equipment manufacturers such as Rogue Fitness, and with that came a recurring strategic question: how do you protect innovation in markets where the underlying products have existed for decades?
“There’s still room to innovate, even in the mature parts of the technology,” Louis DiSanto observes.
In sports and fitness, competitive advantage often lies in refinements that look modest on paper but matter deeply to users: a change in feel, grip, balance, or durability that justifies brand loyalty and a price premium.
For the IP attorney, these refinements are often the hardest to protect. They demand creativity in strategy rather than reliance on any single right. Utility patents, design protection, and brand language each have a role, but only when deployed with a clear understanding of the client’s commercial objectives. This is precisely where experienced, independent advice earns its place: translating legal tools into business outcomes.
Getting into the kitchen: IP as a business partnership
A central theme of the episode is integration. Louis DiSanto describes his approach as “getting into the kitchen” with clients. For him this involves gaining understanding how products are conceived, costed, and positioned, rather than treating IP as a downstream filing exercise.
“When things are handed to us over a table and we’re told ‘go protect this’, you can’t see the whole field,” he explains.
Effective IP strategy depends on understanding where a product fits into a roadmap, what return it needs to generate, and how it contributes to brand identity. The objective is not asset accumulation but return on investment. Louis DiSanto sets a clear benchmark of at least ten times portfolio spend.
That kind of alignment is not built transactionally. It takes time, judgement, and often unbilled effort, necessitating an investment in the relationship itself. That emphasis on trust and long-term effectiveness is also central to what FICPI does: connecting independent practitioners across jurisdictions so that professional relationships make their advice more effective for clients.
Enforcement: proportionality over reflex
Sports and fitness products are easy to copy, and Louis shares that his clients have encountered everything from online marketplace listings to bricks-and-mortar retail infringement. His enforcement framework is deliberately layered: marketplace takedowns where efficient, correspondence where effective, litigation reserved for products that genuinely define a brand.
The more nuanced calls arise at the margins. Pursuing a small local gym for minor infringement may be legally sound but commercially counterproductive.
“You try to have a light touch as much as you can,” Louis notes, while being clear that flagship products require robust defence, because inaction erodes brand equity in ways that are hard to reverse.
Nothing, he emphasises, should be automatic. Independent advisers earn their value by weighing options and consequences, and by helping clients understand that enforcement is a strategic tool, not a default response.
International filing discipline
International protection is another area where businesses regularly overspend. Louis offers clear guidance in this area: be selective.
Filing incremental improvements across multiple jurisdictions may dilute value rather than building it. The better approach is to identify the products that genuinely anchor market entry, protect those early (even ahead of firm expansion plans) and let everything else follow commercial traction rather than precede it.
The unseen arms race
Asked what IP protection ultimately delivers to athletes and consumers who may never read a patent claim, Louis’s answer is simple: competition. Protection forces competitors to design around, improve, and push further. The result is an ongoing cycle in which consumers are the primary beneficiaries.
He also addresses a misconception that founders frequently carry into early IP conversations: the belief that having protection means you have secured the field. It does not work that way.
Portfolios are built incrementally, through sustained innovation and careful judgement. Quantity is not the point.
“Anyone can get you a patent,” Louis says. “The question is whether it actually protects what matters to the business.”
This episode of FICPI Focus 45 is a clear illustration of why the work of independent IP attorneys matters, and how practitioner-to-practitioner dialogue within FICPI’s global community makes that work stronger. Whether your practice touches sport directly or any field driven by incremental innovation and brand differentiation, the insights carry across.
FICPI’s view
For practitioners, innovators, and brand owners, the key challenge is not simply obtaining IP rights but ensuring those rights support broader business goals.
The FICPI community is built on trusted, global relationships. It uniquely combines education and advocacy on topics around patents and trade marks, with a focus on developing the professional excellence of its individual member who are independent IP attorneys from across the world. The FICPI community is driven by a strong shared interest among like-minded people to promote common solutions and advocacy for private practice.
Next steps
- FICPI members may log in to the FICPI website to view the recording of this episode from 29 April 2026 at: https://ficpi.org/on-demand. It ran as part of our celebration of World IP Day 2026.
- Audio-only versions of the episodes are available to any interested parties across major podcast platforms – search for ‘FICPI Focus 45’.
- Find out what webinars are upcoming at: https://ficpi.org/eventstraining/upcoming-webinars
This article was generated by AI using careful prompts from our Communications Committee, review from our IP attorney Editorial Board, and editing from our expert editor.