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Ep 79: Understanding the Future of Patent Law with Patsnap’s Matt Veale
94 Plays14 days ago
How is the rise of AI going to affect the intellectual property field and patents? What are some common mistakes that GCs make when setting up a patent strategy? Or tips that our guest has learned from years as a patent examiner?
Join Matt Veale, European Patent Attorney and UPC at PatSnap, as he leads us into this podcast’s first-ever deep dive into all things patents and IP, sharing expert advice on the best way to work with examiners to bring your innovations to the world.
Listen as Matt discusses why he thinks IP is the most important thing in the world, the importance of data analytics, bridging the gap between lawyers and R&D, building a strong patent strategy, the future of IP law, and much more.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-79
Topics:
Introduction: 0:00
What inspired Matt to be a lawyer: 1:48
What does intellectual property law mean?: 3:40
Starting your legal career at the UK Intellectual Property Office: 5:11
Tips for people filing their first patent: 6:42
Interesting patent applications Matt has seen: 8:47
Tips for GCs who inherit corporate patents: 9:39
Looking for outside patent counsel: 11:55
Patent analytics at PatSnap: 13:44
The future of IP law: 16:38
AI as a tool for patent lawyers: 20:55
Contacting Matt: 25:23
Rapid-fire questions: 25:37
Book recommendations: 26:46
What Matt wishes he knew as a young lawyer: 27:17
Connect with us:
Matt Veale - https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-veale-ip/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading contract lifecycle management platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues.
Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
Recommended
Transcript
Role of Examiners in Patents
00:00:00
Speaker
examiners are people. For now, until we get to the next part of the conversation, talk about AI taking all our jobs, yeah examiners are still people. So you know you have to convince them. So there's a lot of communication skill involved in being an attorney, especially in any lawyer, really. A lot of it is a lot of understanding and knowing the legal as well. But when it comes down to it, it's really communicating your point and trying to negotiate or persuade the examiner to see things the way that you see it and allow patents to be granted with certain scope of claims for protection reasons.
AI's Impact on IP with Matt Veal
00:00:36
Speaker
How is the rise of AI going to affect the intellectual property field and patents? What are some common mistakes that GCs make when setting up a patent strategy? Or tips that our guest has learned from years as a patent examiner? Today, we are joined on the abstract by Matt Veal, a European patent attorney and UPC representative. He can tell us what that means at Pat Snap.
00:01:06
Speaker
Powered by advanced AI, Pat Snap helps IP and R and&D teams collaborate and accelerate across their innovation life cycles. He spent about 10 years before joining Pat Snap as a patent attorney and two years before that as a patent examiner at the UK intellectual property office.
00:01:27
Speaker
I think this is the first episode of the abstract that we've dedicated entirely to IP and patents and R and&D concerns, so I'm excited about this
Matt Veal's Path from Tech to Law
00:01:37
Speaker
one. Matt, thanks for joining me today.
00:01:40
Speaker
Nice to be here, yeah. And I hope it's not the last one they do all on IP. You'll have to recommend some other other great guests. Okay, let's let's go back to the beginning. I want to hear a little bit about you before we get into sort of how is AI going to affect the IP field. What was it that inspired you to become a lawyer? Yeah, absolutely. So always the question, how do you end up as a partner to any, which is a very specific type of lawyer.
00:02:07
Speaker
So yeah, ah it's always a very good question. So for me, I did computer science at university and that wasn't enough. I always wanted to be a lawyer, so at a law degree as well. And then I thought I'd better get a job combining the two of them. And it just so happens that that is perfect to be a patent attorney or a patent examiner or anyone that works within the IP field. So you take your technical background and apply it to legal aspects of intellectual property and your R and&D, et cetera, as well.
Hands-on Experience in IP Field
00:02:37
Speaker
And you actually had some experience sort of like working as a computer consultant or IT t consultant in computer systems before law school. Do you feel like that sort of experience is really useful? I mean, not just the studying in school, but the sort of like practical application of computer science. Do you feel like that's really useful to the sort of IP work that you do today? Did that help convince you that this was going to be your focus?
00:03:05
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think in in all domains, it's important to get hands-on experience. Being purely academic is never a the best way of doing it. is It can be useful, but um actually getting in the field and getting your hands dirty, if you will.
00:03:18
Speaker
And then knowing how to program or how to plug something in is really quite important. and It gives you a ah breadth of understanding ah that when inventors come up to you, you're not just on one side or the other. You really understand where they're coming from and the problems that they're trying to solve. And I think we'll talk about this a bit as we talk about maybe some of the interesting cases that you've worked on.
00:03:39
Speaker
ah yes What is what does IP law mean to you? right Because I think this is actually much broader than people might realize. I think most people think of patents, or they think of IP today as being like you know computer hardware systems, semiconductors, or maybe some like super novel piece of software. But actually, the sort of like realm of what encompasses intellectual property is is much bigger.
Importance of Intellectual Property
00:04:03
Speaker
it Yeah, it absolutely is. So intellectual property,
00:04:07
Speaker
I would say not just because I work there is the most important thing in in the world and if we didn't protect it then you know everyone would exploit everyone else's ideas so whichever company you look at IP the biggest ones IP plays a huge part in that so unless they're natural resource type companies and even them ah have quite a lot of IP in but disney so your your metas your Google Amazon everyone has very high um amounts of IP, and that's IP broadly, so that can be patents, as you mentioned, inventions, et cetera, but it can be trademarks, it can be designs, it can be copyright, it can be trade secrets, know-how, there's the way that they process data as well, which becomes really important now when we talk about data being the new oil. So IP is yeah involved in all of that. So some people said to me before, and I think it's probably well known as like, if you burned Coca-Cola to the ground, took away all their assets,
00:05:00
Speaker
They keep the trade secret and they keep the brand. They'll be back tomorrow and the biggest company in the world again, not one of them. Right. Yeah, the recipe is the IP or the logo. um
Comparing UK and US IP Offices
00:05:11
Speaker
It's not the factory. so So what was it that led you to go and work for the UK intellectual property office? And maybe also tell us a little bit about what the IPO does and is it similar to the US PTO? Is it very different? I actually don't know how how these things work across borders.
00:05:31
Speaker
Yeah. Well, if it's good enough for Albert Einstein, it's good enough for me. and That's why I ended up in the patent office because... right place, right time. I saw the advert and I was looking to become a lawyer and go that route, but then the patent route came up and I saw that and thought, that's a great place to go. And the training you get as an examiner, yeah I'm going to try and sound like I'm a poacher here and take everyone from the a with the patent office and turn them into attorneys or vice versa. But um actually the the training is top quality and you you get a breadth of experience by seeing all the inventors come in you understand the legal process and that really stood me in good stead before i went out there and became an attorney so you know
00:06:14
Speaker
the The difference between the USPTO and the UKPO size is probably going to be the main one there. so um And the amount of patents you're dealing with, but the the technical details, the understanding of the law, how you examine, how you search, all that is fairly yeah fairly the
Advice on Filing Patents
00:06:30
Speaker
same. But a lot more goes on at you to have patent offices than just search and examination. There's a lot of policy that goes there as well, and you know you you know carving the path forward for what the world should look like in the terms of IP. and Are there things that you learned during your time there at the UK IPO that influence or inform how you would recommend people approach filing a patent or do you have tips for people? They're, you know, going out and filing their first patent. Hey, do this, don't do that, right? Examiners hate this, that sort of thing.
00:07:04
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And as you said, that examiners hate things. It's because I'm examiners are people. For now, until we get to the next part of the conversation, talk about AI, taking all our jobs. Yeah, examiners are still people. So, you know, you have to convince them. So there's a lot of communication skill involved in being an attorney, especially in any lawyer, really. A lot of it is a lot of understanding and knowing the legal as well, but when it comes down to it, it's really communicating your point and trying to negotiate or persuade the examiner to see things the way that you see it and allow patents to be granted with a certain scope of claims for protection reasons.
00:07:38
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. Are there differences in you feel like the approach between what's happening in the UK, maybe in continental Europe, other jurisdictions around the world? I'm also just kind of curious to learn a little bit more from you about how patent regimes operate on a sort of international level. Like what level of respect is there for the intellectual property determinations by someone like the IPO or the USPTO?
00:08:08
Speaker
Yeah, so they're fairly well respected. There's global harmonization. And yes, I really want to get into digging in the weeds around specific case law and how you determine whether something is obvious or not. Then that's when you're splitting hairs. But realistically, if it gets granted in one place, it should get granted in the other.
Developing Patent Strategies
00:08:25
Speaker
and But that's not always the case, and I know that. but so Subjectivity is where it differs, but there's a lot of objectiveness that um ti is the same. And with AI coming forward, we should have more global homerozation, so yeah.
00:08:40
Speaker
We'll get to that in just a second. I am really curious to have this sort of conversation around hey how AI is affecting all of this. I'm sure that some of this is, I don't know, confidential or privileged or whatever word we want to use, but are there any interesting or particularly fun patent applications that you saw that maybe ended up being granted that that you can tell us about?
00:09:01
Speaker
Yeah, I know this one. and that the The one that I always joke about is the very first patent that I got to allow. And you'd think it was something really inventive, something clever, something high tech. And it really wasn't where I started was on bedsheets. So yeah, those things that you sleep on sleep on every day. um But it was really quite clever.
00:09:23
Speaker
and I couldn't find it, but there was and a pocket system on the bed sheet that helped the installation, so you didn't hurt your fingers while making the bed. It was inventive, so it went to Grant. As seen on TV, ah that sort of thing. yeah Maybe sort of more broadly, you know you've given us sort of some tips around if you're going to file your first patent, needing to really focus on communication, making your case in a strong way.
00:09:51
Speaker
What about if I'm a GC and I've inherited a few patents or you know the last person, maybe the CEO or the CTO or the first lawyer of the company had, stood up a little bit of something like IP for the business, but I want to develop a more sophisticated patent strategy.
00:10:11
Speaker
What are some sort of like things that you think that you need to do? And and also, how do you sort of create the right process and incentives around this? And
Using Analytics in Patent Strategy
00:10:19
Speaker
my my understanding is that oftentimes, you need to really incentivize technical stakeholders in the business to to bring these ideas forward.
00:10:27
Speaker
Yeah, I understand that. And that's a good question. And we're moving sort of into the next bit of where I went in my career was to talk about patent analytics and making data driven decisions. That's really where we want to get to. And for a long time, that data wasn't really available, like patent data and knowing who's filing where and who's doing what, what are the acceptance rates, the grant rates, that sort of prosecution strategy that you get. And that all blended in together.
00:10:53
Speaker
Thankfully, now, because of things like Pat Snap, it's really easy to get that data and then start to make those strategy decisions going forward. But when you're talking about getting those stakeholders on from the R and&D perspective, why do they want to patent things? Well, historically, we have we have tried I think IBM, well one of the big ones in that, they for every pattern they got granted, they gave everyone a badge or a little bit of a have pay bonus, but some you know those sort of things are still available. But to actually,
00:11:25
Speaker
it's It's quite a badge of honor for most inventors to say, that's my pattern. There's something good about knowing that you have invented something and someone's recognized it and it's gone through the process and you can put it up on the wall. And it's nice to be on the wall, but actually then the next phase comes exactly. It's good to have a piece of paper, but what are you going to do with it and how are you going to take it into the real world?
00:11:46
Speaker
If you're a single inventor, how are you going to make some money out of your patent? um If you're an inventor in a large corporation, it's nice to see your product on the shelf. Totally. I'm sure that you've given GCs over the years or, or IP attorneys in businesses advice about hiring really good outside counsel, maybe cost-effective.
00:12:06
Speaker
outside counsel. What should folks be looking for from that perspective as they think not just about how do we do this internally, but what sort of resources do we need to make sure that this gets done well? I could see me self-promotion there. no ah What we find with general counsels, they are some of the the best lawyers in the world, but so they can't do everything all at once. And I think you'll find in a lot of places that IP becomes very important. Like I said, when IP is such a big value asset to a company, almost most of it, sometimes over 90% of the company is this IP, you probably want someone dedicated to that IP being able to feed up. So you feed to the GC. This is what we know about IP. So you don't have to do it all the time. You've got someone there.
00:12:54
Speaker
or a team you are and working on it. What we find, in especially in the UK and maybe Europe, is that there's a lot of attorneys going in-house now. That might just be for lifestyle fit, but um because of the amount of things that are out there, the way that things are evolving, the AI, the tools that are available now, external counsel is
AI Transforming Patent Landscape
00:13:14
Speaker
shrinking. ah There are good times to have for external counsel, there really is, but sometimes you know it's nice to have someone IP literate and good in the house now. Interesting. That makes sense, I guess, as as you think about
00:13:28
Speaker
sort of competition becoming more intense and businesses becoming more sophisticated and a realization, I think, in a lot of places that ah you need more specialists internally, whether it's privacy hires or IP hires or employment hires. Let's talk a little bit about HatSnap. You've mentioned the sort of like analytics that might help drive decision making or data that might help drive decision making.
00:13:54
Speaker
You have a lot of information or data about patent applications across your clients, I suppose. yeah Tell us a little bit more about like what what types of analytics are we talking about and are there interesting or sort of informative conclusions that that you could share with with the audience?
00:14:12
Speaker
Yeah, so that's where we started 14 more years back. It was just gathering that data. And as I said before, data is very important. You put garbage in, you're going to get garbage out. So actually a lot of the importance of that. And it is mostly publicly available patent data, but it's spread all over the place. So collaboration of it, cleaning of it, validation of it, and then doing the value add, then that's what we're talking about next. like you Now we've got all this data, what can we draw together to make extra value out of that data that we've got? So that really is where pass-up comes to the forefront. yeah know We've done all that hard work, we've brought all that data together, we've cleaned it, we've validated it, and now we're adding value to it. So what are those added values? So they can be simple things like being able to quickly say, what's an examiner's allowance rate?
00:14:58
Speaker
who how many patents has x company filed in this field and over how long and those are sort of things you can then use to drive strategy that's the analytics side of it and that's you know fairly simple um you know we have image data as well for designs for design patents we have lots of life science data now which um It's not my background, but we have lots of it. So there's things like you can do sequence searching, you could do structure searching. It's really, really important, especially not just for IP users, but for those R and&D users. And it's generally, there's a gap between R and&D and IP. You've got quite lawyer-y people, and you've got quite innovator-y people. There's the two short meets. That's the position of ah ah an IP attorney. So they come in there and
00:15:42
Speaker
try to bridge that gap. And now that you have the data and the tools and the visualization, you can say, when you're doing your R and&D and you're inventing, here are all the patterns that you can look at and help you to innovate. And then we know all about them so that when you say, I've got a new invention, what did you look at? How do we craft? What claims we need to say, this is what we built on. This is why it's inventive. And now we will get through to Grant very easy and you've protected your invention. So that whole workflow becomes a lot more transparent and a lot more easy to use for everyone.
00:16:13
Speaker
So that's interesting. So I mean, well, two things, I guess. So one, so you sort of mentioned how, okay, you don't have a life science specialty, right? you You've worked on other areas. That makes a lot of sense, right? You might need to have a pretty technical sort of understanding or a grasp on the ecosystem or industry or the players, the technologies that are there to be a good patent attorney is that the follow on question would be, do you feel like with this sort of technology layer or these analytics that that will still be the case in the future? Or do you think that IP lawyers will maybe be able to work across more sectors or or become slightly more generalist in in the future?
00:16:57
Speaker
So I think, as I said before, like IP touches on a lot of things. So there's licensing, and that's an entirely separate stream that attorneys don't always get involved in, but might know a bit about. It's contract negotiation. There's litigation, um not just patent and draft and file. Talk to examiners. There's that big world out there that we talk about. So yeah. and I'm sure there are cases of where the IP guy has rise risen up through the company and you become a CEO or something or CTO or whatever it might be, because knowing about what's valuable is is valuable. And so IP is important. I'll bang that drum mind just because I'm an IP guy, but um I think it is.
00:17:40
Speaker
Where does AI fit into into this? is it Are you thinking about this from you know it's sort of like machine learning that's processing all of these designs and drawing, discerning patterns? yeah like tell Tell us more about where AI fits into the sort of patenting process you think in the future, or maybe even slightly now.
00:18:05
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. it's It's coming for all our jobs and it's only a matter of time. um is There's a doom and gloom version of that. But so from from my point of view and and from being a computer scientist by background as well, ah yeah knowing the difference between what's being marketed as AI and what actually and computer science would say AI actually is. and What OpenAI and Google are all on media at the moment saying, we've got artificial super intelligence coming. What they actually are are very good tools. And they haven't been, you know, they're all saying is, you know, a bad workman blames his tools, but great tools elevate the craft. So, you know,
00:18:42
Speaker
AI is here and we have to start using it, but we need to know what the right AI tools to use are. And we need to know a lot more about them so that when we use them, we're safe and correct in the application as well. So you've mentioned security being an important thing. It is very important when it comes to AI. And when you're asking AI with confidential but you material, can you trust it? Do you know where it's going? Is it safe?
00:19:07
Speaker
Sure. I think that, well, it seems like an area where AI could help in the sort of patenting processes around the diligence, I would assume, looking across what's been filed before. Are you already using AI in that way? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, Pat Snapp at least has a co-pilot built into it now. So you can ask it questions in natural language and say, tell me about patents related to X. And it will bring that back in a,
00:19:36
Speaker
consolidated manner using a bit of generative AI to actually write paragraphs for you, which is really good. There's pattern drafting tools coming, which, you know again, when i when I say it's a tool, it automates the work. and yeah yeah Anyone that's ever made something yeah never starts from scratch.
AI Tools vs. Human Expertise in Patents
00:19:52
Speaker
You might start from scratch once, but the second time you do it you copy and paste and then start to edit.
00:19:57
Speaker
So if you've got a tool that can have all these things you've done before and go, actually, maybe you'd like something like this to do it again. you And then again, the skill becomes that top level bit, value ads so the So the routine gets taken out of it, the the bulk of write write the description, say what everything is, and then actually you get down to the craft and the skill of the attorney, which is drafting those claims. You can get AI to help you along the way. Same way as the examiner. So if you're searching for a patent, we all knew that you type the words in, you're probably your first search string is going to get 90% of the best results, and then you spend the rest of the time trying to make sure you've not missed anything.
00:20:36
Speaker
So yeah that's that's literally all that AI and tools are doing at the moment. It's really speeding it up, making you more productive. So it's not a bad thing, but it's not taking your job entirely. You just have to adapt to the the world that we're in. Same way as people when they interact. I suppose.
00:20:51
Speaker
Yeah, i I think about this as, you know, I guess the the narrative could be, oh my gosh, AI is going to allow for sort of like the democratization of patent application filing and lots of people will be able to do this from home. And I mean, I don't know, maybe there's there's a world in which that's true at some point, but it's probably more likely that Maybe this is more like do not pay. I don't know if you've seen that there was a recent case about this. Like you might want to use do not pay to fight a parking ticket, but you're probably not going to want to use do not pay to sue the builder who like, you know, installed a defective swimming pool in your backyard.
00:21:32
Speaker
because he's going to go out and fire i hire an attorney and it's going to poke a bunch of holes that like the AI just didn't quite think of or didn't have the ah nuanced expertise to be able to understand. Yeah, how do how do you think about that? How do you think about AI in this landscape being a tool for lawyers versus being a tool for the technologists themselves, let's say, or the inventors themselves?
00:22:02
Speaker
Yeah, so but when you've got things I like, you're talking about maybe low risk, low cost. That's when you're going to want to apply your AI. When you've got high risk and low cost, you still want to go to An attorney, you have to find the budget somewhere. If it's high cost and high risk, you don't want AI you anywhere near it. and Depends how much risk and liabilities involved in all these things. And that's why there's always going to be a lawyer there somewhere because they have to pick up the the risk at the end of the day. So you can't just outsource everything to AI, but you're right. Things like um
00:22:38
Speaker
fight my parking ticket by just getting it to draft ah some routine that it knows quite well that works, then that'll work. But what you end up with is an arms race. So who has the better AI? Who's using it first? And you can apply that to the patent office. So you mentioned sort of like individual inventors being able to file their own patents with the help of AI.
00:23:00
Speaker
probably what's going to happen there is they're going to end up filing rubbish and the patent officers are going to have to find a way to combat that as well. Okay, one last question for you, Matt, on AI and and IP. Do you think at any point AI will end up being leveraged by the other side by patent examiners in their work?
00:23:23
Speaker
Yes, by necessity, everyone will be using AI. So I think I've talked about this before about the AI arms race, basically, which is for the names of all fields, someone who has AI will be far ahead of someone who doesn't, whether it's something like the race for quantum computing and the ability to do that, if you have what OpenAI are calling artificial super intelligence. They know how to build it, and it's coming. and They're going to be racing Google for whoever can make artificial super intelligence. It's been well known now that um R and&D users that use AI innovate faster. um They found more patents. There's a, I think, a Harvard Business Review ah study out
00:24:06
Speaker
in the last couple of weeks that show that. um I'm sure that is not just anecdotal. That will be repeated across everywhere. Myself, I use generative and AI to help me write scripts, write posts, take notes. So it's embedded into my workflows now. So you know everyone will be using it and I think I go back to the point I said before the the most important part of it is is in ensuring you know what you're using so ensuring that it's confident ah ensuring that it's not biased and ensuring that you take care of any hallucinations because you don't want to go in front of a judge and make up cases to you which has been known yeah that was a bad one that was amusing but uh yeah
Matt's Insights and Advice
00:24:49
Speaker
not good for the client
00:24:51
Speaker
Yeah. No, back back to the the question, will the officers use AI? They already do. It's soft AI. oh they Will they use some like semantics search type tools, natural process language processing, that sort of stuff is already in in there. Will they use more of it? Yes, it will just come iteratively. Until, do I think they'll completely get rid of And examiners, for example, no, but did they will use it to help them manage the workload from both sides. ah Before I get to some fun questions for you, if folks want to get connected with you or hear more of your content, where should they find you?
00:25:31
Speaker
Um, I'm on LinkedIn. That's probably the best place to go. Yeah, me too. All right. I've got some, some fun questions for you as we start to wrap up. The first is what's your favorite part of your day to day? Seeing new inventions. It always has been the weird and wonderful.
00:25:50
Speaker
The weirder the better, generally. um You never know what someone's going to invent because that is in its nature. So they come up with an idea. They'll tell you how they've come to it. And it's the cleverest and bizarrest things sometimes. You never know where it's going to come from, where inspiration strikes. And that's why I don't think we're in trouble from AI yet because ah they don't get the breadth of experience that humans do.
00:26:15
Speaker
Totally. Okay, I think this one's kind of fun. Do you have a professional pet peeve? yeah A little bit of a pet peeve. I don't think I've gone a day in my working career without explaining even to myself the difference between patentability and freedom to operate. Can you have a patent and can you take your product to market? They're not the same. There's a lot of overlaps here about who has what, but they're not the same.
00:26:38
Speaker
And folks can call you up if they if they want a ah clear explanation. Absolutely, yeah. and Do you have a book that you would recommend to our listeners? And this doesn't have to be about AI or intellectual property. It could just be something fun that you've read recently, but it also could be something professionally related if you want. I enjoy The Daily Stoic. I think that's a good book to ah to help me yeah think about the work that I do and just navigate general life.
00:27:08
Speaker
Yeah. I've listened to some interviews with, uh, it seems Ryan holiday, right? I listened to some interviews with him. I haven't read the book. I'll have to add that one to my list. And as we start to wrap up a ah final question for you, my sort of traditional closing question for my guests, it's if you could look back on your days as a young lawyer, just getting started, what is one thing that you know now that you wish that you'd known back then?
00:27:37
Speaker
Oh, wow. I don't think about that enough is ah is the honest answer. So what is it? Just keep on going. Just words. There's no real words or wisms. Nothing like I know now that I shouldn't know then. Just um support always and rely on your friends and family and you'll get there.
00:27:56
Speaker
Well, Matt, thanks so much for joining me for this episode of The Abstract. This has been really interesting for me to to learn a lot more about the IP space and it's been fun too. Great. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you very much. And to all of our listeners, thanks so much for tuning in and we hope to see you next time.