Every IP post-mortem sounds the same. “If only we’d filed before the trade show.” “If only someone had checked that one jurisdiction” (cough, cough, Novo Nordisk’s Canadian patent for semaglutide)! Hindsight is 20/20.
There is no point, though, having an IP strategy for the past. And the future you actually have to plan for has no facts in it yet. So what do you reason with?
You can rehearse for the worst the future could bring (Premeditatio malorum). You rehearse it so that it loses its power to surprise you. Face the worst in advance and it arrives as something you have already met.
Applied to your IP, it becomes a discipline. You walk the paths ahead of you. You pre-meditated on the worst outcomes. They lose their shock value and you can deal with them calmly if they happen.
Your pre-meditation will guide you to those points where you feel the most pain. The moments where the timeline splits and one branch leads somewhere you cannot come back from. A disclosure made too early. A deadline that passes once. A right left to lapse because nobody was watching it.
You do not need to predict which future arrives. You need to find the few moves that are irreversible, and treat those with a seriousness the rest never warrant.
Do that and the map changes. The irreversible points become the things you guard. Everything else stays open: a position you can still adjust, trade, or grow into when you know more.