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Alexander Poltorak, PhD

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Alexander I. Poltorak is the Founder and the President of General Patent Corporation (GPC), an intellectual property (IP) management company focusing on intellectual property strategy and valuation. He is the Chairman and CEO of General Patent Corporation International (GPCI) an IP firm focusing on IP licensing and enforcement. He serves as the Managing Director of IP Holdings LLC (IPH), an IP-centric merchant banking organization and an idea incubator affiliated with GPCI.

Aside from his duties at GPC, GPCI and IPH, Alexander Poltorak teaches law at the Globe Institute of Technology.


Prior to establishing GPC in 1987, Alex Poltorak was President and CEO of Rapitech Systems, Inc., a computer technology company that he had founded in 1983 and took public in 1986.

Before that, he served as Assistant Professor of Biomathematics at the Neurology Department of Cornell University Medical College, where he conducted research in image processing and computer tomography. He also served as Assistant Professor of Physics at Touro College. Poltorak has published numerous papers in scientific journals. He is a regular guest-lecturer on intellectual property law and economics at the Columbia University School of Business.

Alexander Poltorak emigrated from the former U.S.S.R. in 1982, where he was awarded a graduate degree in Theoretical Physics equivalent to a Ph.D. in 1980. As a political dissident, he was stripped of his degrees for anticommunist activities.

Alexander Poltorak has co-authored with Paul Lerner two books:

  • Essentials of Intellectual Property (John Wiley & Sons Publishers, Inc., 2002) and
  • Essentials of Licensing Intellectual Property (John Wiley & Sons Publishers, Inc., 2003).

Alex Poltorak also contributed a chapter to Making Innovation Pay - Turning IP into Shareholder Value. Ed. B. Berman (John Wiley & Sons Publishers, Inc., 2006).

Poltorak authored and co-authored numerous articles on intellectual property, including:

  • "The Supreme Court Take the Middle Ground in the eBay Case" (Patent Strategy & Management, v.6, No. 12, July 2006)
  • "'Patent Trolls' and Injunctive Relief" (Patent Strategy & Management, v.6, No. 12, May 2006);
  • "Industrywide Patent Enforcement Strategies" (Patent Strategy & Management, Oct. and Nov. 2005);
  • "What You Need to Know About Patents and Their Value" (Technology.Review.com, April, 2005);
  • "A 'Real World' Risk-Adjusted Patent Valuation Model" (Patent Strategy & Management, November 2004 and January 2005);
  • "Valuing Patents as Market Monopolies" (Patent Strategy & Management, September 2003);
  • "Valuing Individual Patents Comprising a Portfolio" (Patent Strategy & Management, October 2003);
  • "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Intellectual Property Law but Couldn't Afford to Ask" (American Venture magazine, August 2003);
  • "Are Patents Bad for the Economy?" (New York Business Focus, August 2002);
  • "Introducing Litigation Risk Analysis" (Managing Intellectual Property, May 2001);
  • "Corporate Officers and Directors Can Be Liable for Mismanaging Intellectual Property" (Patent Strategy & Management, May and June 2000);
  • "Grain, Grain, Go Away" (Intellectual Property Worldwide, February, 2000); and
  • "Patent Enforcement: To Sue or Not to Sue?" (Inventors' Digest, November/December 2000).

Poltorak gave lectures and taught workshops on

  • "Patent Valuation" at the 3rd Patent Strategies conference in New York, 2007
  • "Fundamentals of Assertive Licensing" at the LES 2006 Annual Meeting in New York;
  • "Patent Valuation" at the LES 2004 Annual Meeting in Boston;
  • "Patent Valuation" at the LES Silicon Valley Chapter in 2003;
  • "Patent Valuation" at the LES Connecticut/Westchester Chapter in 2002;

He was a speaker at

  • IP Finance and Valuation Conference in New York, 2007;
  • Chaired a session and presented at the "Calculating & Proving Patent Damages" Conference in Philadelphia, 2006;
  • The Patent Strategy - 2006 Conference in New York;
    The IPO Conference in March 2005 in Washington, DC;
  • The AIPLA meeting in May 2005 in Philadelphia; and
  • "Life after Rembrandts - New Development in IP Strategy" seminar in August 2005 in Chicago.
  • Maximizing Returns on Intellectual Property Conferences in New York, 2005

Alexander Poltorak was profiled in a New York Times feature article (Teresa Riordan, "Trying to Cash in on Patents," June 10, 2002) and by IP Investor Magazine ("He Wrote the Book," Apr. 2007). Alex has been often interviewed on CNN, CBS, Tokyo TV, CFO Magazine, InstitutionalInvestor.com, WallStreetReporter.com, Industry Week, EE Times and Bloomberg Radio. He serves on the advisory editorial board of Patent Strategy & Management. Tokyo TV Ch. 12 featured a documentary about Poltorak and his company in May of 2002.

Poltorak is a member of the Licensing Executives Society (LES), the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO), the New York Academy of Science, the American Physical Society, International Society for General Relativity and Gravitation, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a U.S. co-chairman for the Subcommittee on Information Exchange of the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council.