With precision as a compass and innovation as the guide, IP leaders like Robert Chan are redefining the boundaries of creativity and protection in the current evolving landscape.
As the Founding Partner and Trademark Attorney of Sun&Chan IP, Robert has spent over a decade navigating the complexities of intellectual property law. His career includes experience at top-tier IP firms in China and in-house legal roles at a Canadian animation company, giving him a unique perspective on global IP strategy and business operations. Under his leadership, Sun & Chan IP has evolved into a mid-size IP services provider, recognized for its commitment to precision, innovation, and client-centricity. He has successfully positioned the company as a bridge between Chinese and international clients and continues to shape the future of IP law, driving innovation and excellence.
From Stability to Innovation: The Notable Transition
Robert Chan’s decision to leave a top-ten IP firm in China and co-found Sun & Chan was driven by a deep-seated dissatisfaction with the status quo. Despite the stability and predictability of his role, Robert envisioned a future of stagnation that ultimately prompted him to seek a new path. This choice wasn’t a rejection of stable careers but rather a personal desire for growth and autonomy. For Robert, the stability of a large firm had become a constraint, limiting his potential rather than ensuring security.
Shaping Global IP Strategy: A Leadership Perspective
As Supervisor of the Foreign Trademark Division, Robert gained invaluable insights into global IP strategy. They developed a deep understanding of intellectual property laws across jurisdictions by organizing and maintaining a worldwide IP service supply chain. His experience as an in-house legal director at an animation company further informed his perspective, enabling him to align IP strategy with business operations and identify high-potential IP assets. This expertise allows him to navigate the complexities of global IP, advising clients on protection for sequencing, infringement protocols, and partnership strategies.
Guided by Values: Committed to Excellence
Robert’s journey as an intellectual property attorney is anchored by the principle of rigor and caution. For him, precision is paramount, and even minor oversights can have far-reaching consequences. To mitigate risks, Robert implements meticulous processes, including routine checklists and cross-certification protocols. He also fosters a culture of attention to detail within his team through structured training, real-case simulations, and weekly review sessions that analyze near-miss scenarios. These collective learning opportunities help hardwire meticulousness into the team’s professional DNA, ensuring that precision remains a core value in their work.
Assuring Consistent Expertise: Across Industries
Sun & Chan IP ensures consistent expertise across diverse industries, from biotechnology to semiconductors, through a three-pronged approach. Firstly, the firm maintains a team of specialized attorneys with technical fluency and industry-specific acumen, delivering legally airtight solutions. Secondly, a rigorous onboarding and immersive apprenticeship model develops high-potential young attorneys into confident, self-sufficient practitioners. Thirdly, the firm prioritizes continuous learning through mandatory tech-literacy benchmarks and cross-industry foresight programs, empowering the team to anticipate and adapt to breakthroughs in emerging fields. This commitment to specialization, mentorship, and innovation ensures that Sun & Chan IP remains a trusted partner across the evolving IP landscape.
The Significant Changes: Over a Decade
Over the past decade, the intellectual property services industry has undergone significant changes, driven primarily by the AI-driven revolution in operational models. AI has dramatically improved service efficiency and reduced costs, disrupting the industry’s pricing structure. While this shift may necessitate workforce restructuring, it ultimately yields more benefits than drawbacks. As AI continues to advance, it will likely further boost review efficiency, including in patent examination workflows.
Emerging Tech and IP: A New Paradigm
Companies in emerging tech sectors, like AI and blockchain, approach trademarks and IP with heightened demands for proactive safeguards. Operating at the vanguard of technological innovation, they pioneer new interpretations of IP frameworks, particularly in patent strategy. Despite the speculative nature of R&D, these innovators must navigate established doctrines like novelty assessments and inventive step requirements. This requires specialists who can bridge technical foresight with regular pragmatism, ensuring effective IP protection.
China’s Innovative Shift: Impact on Foreign Companies
Robert firmly believes that China’s growing emphasis on innovation is impacting foreign companies’ IP strategies in the region. As China accelerates its technological advancements, foreign corporations are recalibrating their approaches to practice localized innovation and collaboration. Many are now orienting their IP portfolios toward collaborative patents and joining R&D initiatives with Chinese partners, leveraging China’s talent and industrial capabilities to drive next-generation breakthroughs. This shift reflects the need for companies to adapt and thrive in China’s innovation-driven economy.
Elevating IP Education and Transparency
Digital platforms and online IP databases are enhancing client education and legal transparency, allowing clients to develop a sharper understanding of high-caliber IP services and their business value. This shift compels IP professionals to continuously elevate their capabilities and maintain thought leadership, guiding clients through evolving challenges—those who fail to deliver solution-oriented expertise risk obsolescence in an increasingly sophisticated ecosystem.
The Major IP Challenges: Sustaining Innovation and ROI
Robert believes that the biggest IP challenges for companies in the next 5-10 years will be sustaining high-caliber innovation while maintaining strategic, ROI-driven IP investment. To avoid a cyclical decline, enterprises must architect systems where the IP portfolio directly fuels revenue streams through licensing, market exclusivity, or cross-ecosystem collaboration.
By aligning IP strategies with business metrics, companies can convert protection costs into strategic assets, ensuring IP remains a growth accelerator rather than a budgetary liability.
Preparing for the Future Obstacles
Sun & Chan is preparing for evolving issues in IP rights related to the metaverse, NFTs, and virtual brands by deepening its engagement in these cutting-edge domains. Despite limited practical applications and precedents, the firm sees an opportunity to emerge as a standard-setter and first mover. Through early-stage immersion, Sun&Chan aims to secure frontline industry intelligence, resources, and influence, cementing its irreplaceability and driving the evolution of IP agency services.
Creating a Legacy: Empowering the Community
Under Robert’s leadership, Sun & Chan aspires to leave a lasting legacy in the global IP legal community by embodying authentic value-creation practitioners. The firm aims to codify and disseminate its IP strategy frameworks, empowering industry peers and cultivating a knowledge ecosystem that transforms expertise into scalable methodologies. By doing so, Sun & Chan will ensure innovation protection paradigms evolve in tandem with emerging technologies, driving industry-wide excellence and innovation.
Future Plans for Strategic Growth
In the near term, Sun & Chan plans to scale its talent strategically, with measured team growth aligned with service quality benchmarks and strategic roadmap milestones. In the long term, the first is building an institutional legacy framework, transitioning from partner-dependent operations to systems that assure generational sustainability.
Through formalized knowledge transfer protocols and leadership pipelines, Sun & Chan aims to embed its core philosophy of value-first innovation into the company’s structural DNA, decoupling organizational resilience from individual tenure.
