Where IP Meets Imagination: The Case for a Creative Bridge

by Ashley Cheung, Ideator & Organizer, ADAPT Happy Hour

Founder of Virtual Patent Gateway

At our Regional meeting on the Google Campus in April, I asked Connie Brenton and Jeff Franke if we could include the RLLB and LegalOps.com logos on our materials. Without a moment of hesitation, they both said yes. That single exchange told me everything about the kind of support this idea had, before it ever became an event.

None of this happens without ADAPT.legal's leadership trusting a small team with a big idea and the room to build it.

I have learned to trust my own instincts as an ideator. I can see a room before it exists, not just the layout, but the feeling I want people to carry out the door, the shape of an evening before a single detail is confirmed. Instinct like that isn't confidence. It is pattern recognition earned the hard way, over years of rooms that worked and rooms that didn't.

Building this ADAPT Happy Hour taught me something instincts alone never could: vision gets you a blueprint. It doesn't get you a room full of people. For that, we need others willing to say yes before there's anything to say yes to.

At VPG, I'm accustomed to a certain rhythm. I consult my team when making decisions; however, the final call is mine. This was different. Not because I ceded control, but because I had to sit inside the discomfort of not being the only vote in the room. For a recovering people-pleaser, that's a strange kind of growth: learning that real collaboration isn't about softening myself to keep the peace; it's about holding my ground long enough for someone else's idea to test mine and staying open when it does.

For this September ADAPT Happy Hour, people can see the invitation, venue, and run of show. They won’t see the string of calls, the shared drafts, the small decisions made together that turn a concept into a room full of people willing to be a little more honest about who they are. We intentionally included conversations and fun doodle experiences, guided by Professor Sasha Strauss and featuring women who have spent decades in the IP ecosystem, sharing their narratives and essence.

Frances Wrinkler and I reached out to our network for sponsorship with resilience and persistence, and we're grateful for the support we've secured so far, Kennedy & Lenart, Wolf Greenfield, ALG, Holland & Hart, Sterne Kessler Goldstein & Fox, Foley IP Law, Urban Raccoons Creative Hub (a social media arm of Virtual Patent Gateway), Everpure, Jiaquan IP Law, and United Lex. Additionally, Bonnie Korte, Sarah Foley, and Jessica Broyles each helped rally support, financially and physically. Four different instincts, sharpened over four different careers, aimed at the same two hours in a room in Las Vegas.

It would have been faster for one person to decide everything. It also would have been a worse event. Every time one of us pushed back or asked what if we did it this way instead, the concept got stronger. That friction isn't a delay in the process; it is the process.

IP professionals spend their careers translating other people's brilliance into language the world can protect. That is what collaboration inside this ecosystem should actually look like: not a single ideator with a vision, but a circle of people willing to hand each other the marker, cover for each other's blind spots, and trust the finished thing will be better for having passed through five sets of hands instead of one.

ADAPT.legal has spent years insisting the IP ecosystem is stronger when its people stop competing for airtime and start compounding each other's ideas. This Happy Hour is that belief made real — long before Doodle Your Essence became the signature moment of the night. It's how the best work in this industry actually gets done: quietly, in shared documents and follow-up calls, long before anyone in the room sees the finished version.

If you're in Las Vegas on September 9th, join us and see what this team has built. Then pick up a marker and doodle your own brand essence.