From patents to privacy to export control, innovations in artificial intelligence present attorneys with significant career opportunities.  David and Jenn from Morgan Lewis explain how AI impacts their work and advise on ways students can prepare for future work.

 

More on David Sanker & Jenn Wang.

 

SPEAKERS

David Sanker, Wayne Stacy, Jenn Wang

 

Wayne Stacy  00:00

Welcome, everyone to Berkeley Center for Law and Technology's Career Podcast. I'm Wayne Stacy, the Executive Director for BCLT. And today we have two attorneys from the the law firm of Morgan Lewis, David Sanger and Jenn Wang. And we wanted to talk with him a little bit today about what the the practice of law looks like around artificial intelligence. It is, especially artificial intelligence and patents, and what is a, what is a practitioner do for day to day? And what does it practice gonna look like over the next decade? So, David, I'll start with you. You know, tell us a little bit about your background and what your legal practice looks like.

 

David Sanker  00:48

Oh, thank you. Yeah. So fortunately, I was able to go to Berkeley Law a few years ago. And while I was at Berkeley Law, I was a summer associate at Morgan Lewis. And I started my work, thinking that I was going to focus on patent litigation. And I did mostly patent litigation. But I also did quite a bit of patent prosecution. Sort of an ancillary basis. And then, so I saw a lot of familiarity with with the patent litigation side, as well as the patent prosecution side. And after about four years that I've been doing exclusively, patent prosecution work. Prior to law school, I actually did software development for 12 years. So I have a lot of background in software. And that has been very, very helpful. Most people don't have that much background before they go into patent law. So that's, that's, that's my, my background and how about Jenn, why don't you say a little bit about what you do.

 

Jenn Wang  01:55

Yeah. So I work with David Sanger, together on patent prosecution. So we do a lot of software hardware, different kind of technology or patent applications and do prosecution. But my background comes from technical background comes from undergraduate in finance and a graduate degree in electrical engineering, then I also worked in our technology company for three and a half years. Then I come to law school, and I'm working in a law company together at the same time. So I'm in the part time in Santa Clara. It's not Berkeley, but it's close neighbor. Then after graduation, I start to practice full time on patent prosecution. It has been like six years, so kind of close to your law school students. So I may have a lot of experience in terms of early career development to share with you. So that's my background. Thank you.

 

Wayne Stacy  03:00

So one of the things I heard when I was at the PTO you talk with with new companies, and they would inevitably say, well, we read on the internet, that software isn't patentable. So we didn't worry about software patents. And, you know, the first time I heard it, I thought it was an anomaly. Oh, here's a company that didn't didn't talk to anybody. But then we started looking across the country between all the regional directors, and it came up over and over again. And so we started looking, and you can find a lot of information on the web that says, you know, software's basically not patentable. And then if it's not patentable, that means there's no real career path in it. For people looking to do software patent work, what do you have to say to that?