Nicole Shanahan, the vice presidential pick for independent presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a patent lawyer who founded an AI-powered SaaS patent-management platform that she sold to one of the country’s biggest patent trolls. She’s now a full-time philanthropist.  

Shanahan founded ClearAccessIP in 2013 while studying for her law degree at Santa Clara University. Her work as a paralegal and technology specialist up to that point had been focused on the patent space, her LinkedIn page says. Her first job as a paralegal was at Aeon Law, a patent specialist, and she continued in the patent space in supporting capacities at Longan Law Firm, Townsend and Townsend and Crew, and Rutan & Tucker. 

In 2010 she joined RPX Corporation, a defensive patent aggregator that purchases patents for the expressed purpose of keeping them out of the hands of offensive aggregators, or trolls. 

While there, she helped the company build a licensing matrix to track transactions between patent portfolios and licensees and worked with a team that bid on a big telecommunications patent portfolio. 

“The more time I spent around patent data, the more I realized the value in aggregating it and creating standard processes of analysis around the patented technologies,” she told Mogul in 2015.

Shanahan launched ClearAccessIP as a cloud-based software-as-a-service platform that tries to make it easier for companies to create, manage and monetize patents by applying an AI-based analytics tool to aggregated patent data. By providing a picture of the patents that already exist in a space, who owns the patents, and where there are gaps — what patent specialists call white space — companies can see if their innovation encroaches on patents and could be challenged or if there are white spaces they can fill with patents. 

The SaaS platform also functions as a marketplace for transacting licensing rights, helping companies monetize their patents. 

"ClearAccessIP is often described as the dream platform by IP professionals that have struggled to find commercial and transactional opportunities for their clients," Shanahan said of her platform in 2019 after announcing the company received a $3.7 million capital infusion from private equity investors. "Every time we hear a new user say 'this could have saved me a seven figure litigation had I had this last year,' I feel the urgency to move more quickly in our mission.”

That was in 2019. Less than a year later, she sold the company to IPwe, another patent management platform company that was founded by Erich Spangenberg, whose previous company, IPNav, was a high-profile offensive patent aggregator, or troll. 

“I played in … the troll business, and inefficiency permitted me to make a fortune,” Spanenberg said in a 2018 CNBC interview.

Spanenberg made about $150 million through his patent aggregation company, CNBC said. 

His new company isn’t an aggregator in the way his old company was, Spanenberg says. His goal is to create a platform that can help create a robust market for buying and selling patent rights, helping to create more realistic valuations and wring inefficiency out of the system that today enables bad deals to be made. 

“Over time the illusive patent quality will improve,” Spanenberg told CNBC. “R&D and patent examiners having better tools. We will make more if there are more quality patents. We are capitalists at the end of the day.”

As a patent specialist and later patent technology entrepreneur, Shanahan likely made valuable contacts in the private equity space though Segey Brin, the cofounder of Google to whom she was married from 2018 to 2022. She also is reportedly close to Elon Musk.  

Since 2014 she’s had a fellowship at CodeX, the Stanford University program that focuses on the development of legal technology. 

“I feel that it’s important that lawyers don’t just practice law but actually serve as guardians of progress, and improving the patent system is just one small piece of this large puzzle,” she told Mogul.  

As a philanthropist, she’s focused her giving on criminal justice reform and sustainable living. She said she was attracted to Kennedy’s campaign, and donated money to it and to groups supporting his candidacy, in part because of its focus on chronic diseases, which ties into Shanahan’s sustainable living concerns. Kennedy has been accused of giving credence to conspiracies about the safety of vaccines, among other things.  

“You can be both very ambitious and very compassionate,” she said in the Mogul interview. “Don’t let anyone make you think otherwise.”