Note: this is adapted from my Stanford Law School personal statement, and describes how my career path led me to pursue patent law (and what I love about it).
I can’t tell you the exact time I fell in love with patent law, but I can tell you the place. It was in Room 280B, Stanford Law School. I was a third-year MS/PhD student searching for a way to add broader context to my work in engineering, and I found it in Jeff Schox’s classroom.
I had applied to Stanford in the first place in large part because of Stanford’s commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration: I wanted to learn from and work with not only engineers, but also biologists, chemists, physicists, and even entrepreneurs and attorneys. I knew those interactions would help me grow in interesting and unexpected ways.
Fittingly, I never expected to fall in love with patent law, but I am extremely grateful that I did. For the past few years, I’ve worked as a patent agent at Schox Patent Group, managing patent portfolios for over thirty VC-backed startups. My work at Schox has given me a glimpse of the challenging, multi-faceted world of patent law, and it has driven me to expand my role in that world by attending Stanford Law School to become a patent attorney.
In many ways, my job is that of a storyteller. Startups live or die by their ability to tell a compelling story, and their patents form an integral part of that story. Effective patent portfolios must be not only independently valuable, but also consistent with the rest of a startup’s story.
Accordingly, to craft a patent portfolio, I must first understand the story’s arc: how a startup’s resources will be transformed to produce a desired result. Fully understanding the arc of a startup’s story requires the use of technical skills to evaluate the startup’s resources, business knowledge to comprehend the desired result, and innovative thinking to envision the transformation.
Technical skills enable me to evaluate a startup’s inventive resources; that is, the knowledge and expertise from which inventions arise. My clients work at the cutting edge of a variety of exciting technical fields, which means that I must not only maintain a broad base of technical knowledge, but also be ready to supplement that knowledge with information so advanced that my clients are often the only people in the world who possess it. As someone whose first love was engineering research—explored for over three years at Stanford with Roger Howe, one of the world’s leading experts in microelectromechanical systems—I can’t begin to explain how exciting the thought of constantly learning from technology’s game-changers is.
Business knowledge helps me comprehend the goals of my clients. These goals play an important role in how I craft portfolios; for example, the ideal portfolio of a company seeking acquisition may focus almost exclusively on core technology, while the ideal portfolio of a company seeking to go public may have increased emphasis on applications of the core technology. The alignment of a portfolio with a startup’s business goals can be the difference between funding and failure, so the stakes are high. Thankfully, the reward is worth it; when my clients succeed I am not only proud of my involvement, but also thrilled to see the world bettered in some small way by their accomplishment.
Innovative thinking allows me to assist my clients in reaching their goals in ways they might not expect. Typically, there is a clear link between a startup’s inventive resources and the startup’s business goals; however, the clear link is rarely the only link. It doesn’t take much thought to realize that an electronics company desiring to cover the world with wireless internet should patent their transceiver technology, but it might take more insight to realize that the same company may benefit from applying their knowledge in electronics to extend wireless internet range over power lines. The opportunity to help a client explore the myriad possibilities enabled by their technology is both honoring and humbling. After all, how many people get the chance to brainstorm with Silicon Valley’s brightest minds?
After defining the arc of a startup’s story, I can begin my contribution. Just as with any other good storytelling, drafting patents requires attention to detail at a number of levels. Perhaps unlike most stories, though, a patent’s worth can turn on a single word. Consequently, drafting captures my attention at every conceivable resolution. To me, the process evokes comparison to fractal generation, which Benoit Mandelbrot described as “Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful.”
Of course, drafting is only the beginning of my contribution—after all, my clients need issued patents, not just applications. Patent prosecution is every bit as nuanced as drafting, but it is perhaps more subtle. On the surface, patent prosecution seems adversarial: the noble task of proving novelty and non-obviousness using strength of fact and logic. The deeper reality is that strength of fact and logic is useless if not understood, and so I find that the ultimate challenge of patent prosecution lies not in argument, but in education. What a wonderful challenge to face!
I love my job, and I’m good at what I do; but for me, good is not quite good enough. At the end of my career, I want to look upon the wake of technological progress and see a ripple all my own. In my work at Schox, I’ve discovered that patent law is an ideal area for me to make this kind of impact.