This seat is two jobs sharing a corridor. The commercial half negotiates master sale and supply agreements for hardware that ships, which means Uniform Commercial Code Article 2 risk of loss, acceptance and rejection, express and implied warranty scope, spare-parts and service-level duties on installed plant, and limitation-of-liability wording that cannot exclude personal injury or property damage in most jurisdictions. Vertiv's FY2025 Form 10-K describes assurance-type warranties tied to contract specifications and flags penalty provisions and liquidated damages where orders are missed. The Westerville requisition asks for 6 or more years and puts the lawyer onsite beside Sales, Strategy and Growth.
The IP half is a docket job. That same filing counts roughly 3,000 registered patents and 1,900 pending, published or allowed applications, plus about 1,900 registered trademarks, against $441.7 million of engineering and research spend in 2025. An Americas IP counsel reporting to a global head of IP runs licensing, enforcement, monetisation and claim charts over thermal, power and liquid-cooling hardware, which is why USPTO registration is a gate and not a preference.
Our Columbus mandate telemetry shows the strongest candidates arrive from 3 adjacent benches: patent prosecution associates at Ohio IP boutiques, procurement counsel at industrial manufacturers such as the UPS and inverter makers clustered in north Columbus, and commercial counsel out of electrical distribution. A head of legal recruiting at a Midwest industrial manufacturer told us the prosecution bench converts fastest, because claim-chart fluency cannot be taught inside a notice period.
