AI and IP Law, A Cautious Embrace

Wayne Stacy brings a unique perspective from his role as executive director of Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. From his early days as a patent litigator to directing the Silicon Valley USPTO office and earning a Fulbright to work in Nepal, Wayne has witnessed dramatic changes in how technology affects legal practice. This conversation explores how AI is transforming legal education, the evolution of patent litigation costs, and why future lawyers need different skills than previous generations.

Key Takeaways:

• AI enables lawyers to focus on higher-value work by automating routine tasks
• Legal education must teach AI integration rather than AI avoidance
• Cross-disciplinary collaboration between law and engineering drives innovation policy
• Future lawyers need policy development skills alongside traditional legal training
• Berkeley's position in Silicon Valley creates unique opportunities for public discussions
• Entry-level lawyers must scale up capabilities to remain relevant in AI era

Understanding IP Matters is brought to you by the nonprofit Center for Intellectual Property Understanding (CIPU) with generous support from its partners and sponsors. The podcast provides leading innovators and experts the space to share their IP stories.

Transcript

[Wayne Stacy] (0:00 - 0:10)
The world is different than when I started practicing, you know, the size of the giant companies. They don't need patents. Elon Musk said patents are for the weak.

[Bruce Berman] (0:14 - 1:20)
Hello, I'm Bruce Berman, host of Understanding IP Matters, the acclaimed series that provides leading innovators and experts the space to share their IP story, the good, the bad, and the incredible. Wayne Stacy has a unique vantage point from where he sits near San Francisco Bay. As executive director of the renowned Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, he deals regularly with leading researchers, educators, entrepreneurs, and investors.

He also speaks to many students. Wayne's interests include science, technology, intellectual property, and, of course, artificial intelligence. Wayne had a successful career as a patent litigator at leading law firms representing clients from venture capital to Fortune 50.

IP education has always been a passion. In 2020, he was named director of the Silicon Valley Office of the USPTO. He received a Fulbright in 2024 to work with Nepal's leading law school and help design a legal curriculum focused on AI and data.

Wayne, thanks for joining us today. It's good to see you again.

[Wayne Stacy] (1:20 - 1:23)
Well, Bruce, thank you for having me and it's always good to see you.

[Bruce Berman] (1:23 - 1:35)
Good, good. Okay, let's get right into it. Technology is a moving target.

It's moving so fast right now, especially AI. What's trending today at universities and law schools? What are you seeing?

[Wayne Stacy] (1:36 - 3:46)
Well, I mean, the beautiful thing about Berkley is it's at the heart of all of this in AI. If you tell people here, the professors that AI is new, they may throw things at you because they're like, we've been doing this for 30 years. But the emphasis and the involvement campus-wide has changed.

So in the engineering school, in data science school, you start seeing more students being interested in it. So we've got this great robotics program, for example, that's linking AI and robotics. So you're starting to see these cross pieces.

But I think campus-wide, you're seeing these initiatives to bring policy individuals, people from the law school and the engineering school together to talk about, hey, how do we look at regulating this in the future? How much regulation is necessary? Zero is not the answer.

And 100% is not the answer. But what is the answer? And Berkley was kind of its unique position sitting in Silicon Valley, but as an outsider in many ways, and kind of looking at the public good, really, really pushes that debate forward.

And it's great to listen to a lot of the campus discussions, the events we have for students and for academics, where you'll see people pile in to try to understand what the future looks like, or what it should look like. I think part of this comes from the recognition that the way the internet grew out of the social media and how it all popped up. Well, Section 230 was no regulation, basically.

And it allowed a lot of things to happen, and it's huge growth. But now it could be part of the problem. And people are debating that and saying, well, OK, you've got to drive that growth.

But when do you need to look at it and start evaluating? And how do you do it? So it's been a great discussion.

I don't know if the answers are there yet. But if we don't have the discussion, nobody's ever going to have the answers. That's right.

[Bruce Berman] (3:47 - 4:03)
And for future entrepreneurs, it's interesting because they have this need to move quickly and do incredible things. But also, they're aware of the need to kind of manage that or rein it in somewhat, or at least project where it might go.

[Wayne Stacy] (4:03 - 5:13)
I work with a group that focuses on deep tech. It's a combined law school, engineering school, and Haas Business School. So all graduate level students.

And it's great to see them start thinking about this. And one of the statements we always use is if your business is regulated, regulation is your business. And you've got to understand that you don't get to build everything you want to build.

You need to pave the way and understand how to fit in. And a lot of times, that's data usage. That's going to be AI usage.

You're seeing in the robotic space. So it's great to get students into that mindset early on and have them start asking that question about, well, where do I need to be involved? I'm an engineer, but where should I be involved on policy development?

Because policy development is product development. So kind of one in the same. If you get clipped after spending millions and millions of dollars to develop a product, you've lost.

So you need to make sure people know what you're building is thoughtful.

[Bruce Berman] (5:14 - 5:20)
What's different today about preparing lawyers for practice than, say, a generation ago?

[Wayne Stacy] (5:21 - 7:30)
Well, I'm not going to go even go a generation ago, Bruce. How about five years ago? Okay.

I'm a generation where I remember when, and I hate to say this, I feel like I'm getting old. First law firm I worked at, they were complaining about their new networked computers, just in the office where there was a central storage facility rather than a local computer. They're like, well, that's going to ruin law.

Well, people are just going to copy these briefs from somebody else. And then, of course, people are like, well, and then we make money by typing from original thoughts. And, of course, very quickly it moved on.

And we went from books to Westlaw and Lexus so you can do more research. But the interesting thing is the price of litigation, the price of legal work hasn't gone down. What it's gotten is more robust.

It's easier to file more documents now. And it's easier to produce more documents and search more documents. So the technology in some ways has always been part of it, but not a real driver of innovation in the industry.

It's just allowed for more of the same, and in some ways, higher quality of the same for those that have access to it. I think AI is causing a different level of discussion because it can automate a lot of the lower end tasks. A lawyer charges $1,000 an hour.

Well, that's a blended rate because some of their work is worth $1,500 an hour. Part of it's worth $500 an hour because they're looking for periods and commas in a final brief. That's not really high end legal work.

AI looks to take away some of the more mundane, more repetitive work. That's kind of the real change. And so the way it looks is it will enable attorneys to focus on the higher end work.

Right.

[Bruce Berman] (7:31 - 7:36)
So it's really redefining what is a lawyer today, or what will be a lawyer in the future.

[Wayne Stacy] (7:37 - 8:10)
Very much so. And it may change the name, the game around leverage. So in other words, if I did insurance defense, well, I used to be able as a partner to manage 20 cases because they all look similar.

Well, now I need to manage 100 because the briefings look the same, and I can get updates and reports. And the concern of that, of course, is you don't need the entry level lawyers, because that's kind of always my pitch is AI doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be a decent.

[Bruce Berman] (8:11 - 8:12)
Good enough. Right.

[Wayne Stacy] (8:12 - 9:36)
Third year lawyer. If it's a 75% third year lawyer, I can use it as a partner. But what does that mean for entry level people?

And I think that means we need to scale up what they can do early on. And instead of having them be afraid of AI and you know, everybody talks about these hallucinations that pop up in the legal industry. What we're trying to teach is how to incorporate AI so they can have their own mentor from day one.

I mean, you know, if you've got the system that can look at all the cases and other briefs, it should be able to help me as a first year, get a, you know, a nutshell on this topic and say, what are the, what are the best defenses or what are the best offenses in this particular case and best arguments? And then you just have to be smart enough and thoughtful enough, not just to cut and paste, but to look at them and say, this makes sense. This makes sense.

This one doesn't make sense. So as a first year, you got to upscale quickly. And that's what we're trying to do is instead of running away from the technology, really incorporate it so they can figure out how to use it early on.

And, you know, you don't have to wait for the partner to give you feedback on a brief, right? Maybe AI could be my colleague and give me feedback to begin with.

[Bruce Berman] (9:36 - 10:16)
Yeah. Well, the opportunity for apprenticeship, not just in law, but in many areas is minimized with AI because that, you know, that learning assistant editor in the entertainment world, the film world, you don't need the assistant editor anymore, you know, so you and protracted timeline of patent litigation particularly is inconvenient to large corporations for sure. For everyone, it's expensive, but it can be devastating to small and medium-sized businesses and independent inventors.

You know, what are some of the impacts and what can we do about them?

[Wayne Stacy] (10:17 - 11:45)
This is the thing I've been yelling about for years. You know, there are two parts of the patent system or any IP system. You need to be able to protect IP.

You know, I need to be able to file the patent office and get a pretty good work product back from them and have a good idea of what my invention scope is. But you can have the best patents in the world if you can't get them into an enforcement system. The system doesn't work.

And I think that's where the U.S. is broken right now. The patent litigation has gotten so expensive. I mean, a lawyer at my level now would be over $2,000 an hour.

And you don't litigate by yourself. You're litigating with a huge team. You know, you're looking at millions and millions of dollars.

To give you a number, we're listening to a recent conference and one of the law firms, you know, high-end law firms that does enforcement work on contingency, and one of the big investors, you know, the funders, said that they're looking for cases that have a minimum of $100 million return. That's all they can afford to invest in anymore because they're expecting to spend $20 to $25 million. And so they need 4, 5, 6X return.

So think about that for a minute. You can't even go to a litigation funder unless you have a $100 million case.

[Bruce Berman] (11:45 - 11:53)
How many of those cases are actually paid? There are some multi-hundred million dollar cases, but often they're not paid in the long run.

[Wayne Stacy] (11:53 - 13:49)
Well, in emerging companies that are getting into a space and that need to, you know, they've got great innovation, but they need to stop somebody from copying, that's where it's really hard. So if your entire market is only $100 million, that's a great small business. I mean, that's a great small business.

You know, it can really generate a lot of jobs, but your patents can't support you. And I think that is, to me, the number one threat in the way our litigation system has developed with heavy, heavy discovery, kind of running damages and in validity and infringement all at the same time, the costs have gotten out of control. And then the problem is your end game is uncertain.

You know, damages now are highly suspect. You know, you talk to a lot of experts, they don't know really what to put together anymore because the federal circuit keeps changing the game. And they get overturned, not just the billion dollar judgments get overturned, but now there are $20 million judgments, $30 million judgments.

You tie all that together with taking five years, no injunction. It's really devastating. And, you know, I'd have to question as a U.S. innovator what a patent really gives me, except maybe a chance to sell my company to a bigger company. You know, it's always that fear of, hey, if they put me out of business, well, then I can sue them after I'm out of business, but I worry about the costs, not letting kind of small, medium enterprises generate jobs and move forward to being a bigger business.

[Bruce Berman] (13:50 - 14:23)
And innovation, when patents can't be enforced or readily or litigated for infringement, it not just, you know, looks good on the surface. Like, well, no one's wasting money and, you know, companies aren't deep pocketed, companies aren't being targeted. But it also kind of dilutes the DNA of innovation.

If truly disruptive, important inventions get pushed aside because they can't be protected, that's not good either.

[Wayne Stacy] (14:24 - 14:44)
Yes and no, Bruce. I tell you where I absolutely agree, that 100% applies to, you know, the small medium enterprise world. Right.

The world is different than when I started practicing, you know, the size of the giant companies. They don't need patents. Elon Musk said patents are for the weak.

[Bruce Berman] (14:45 - 14:50)
And he is right. They have brand. That brand is everything in a way.

[Wayne Stacy] (14:50 - 15:52)
Brand manufacturing contracts, commercial relationships, they just have this whole ecosystem that prevents people from copying their products. You know, look, if you gave me the blueprint for the most recent iPhone, great. What can I do with it?

Right. You know, I don't have, you know, iTunes. I don't have, you know, Apple Music.

I don't have everything else. I don't have the manufacturing contacts. It can't be done.

So the size of the giants kind of make patents irrelevant for them, but they still get a lot of patents. Sure. But they don't need them for competition broadly.

They may be against each other, you know, Apple, Samsung, but I just don't know what the real value is to small, medium enterprises with the way our system has developed. And so that's where I quarrel with you a little bit. For them, it affects the innovation system a hundred percent.

[Bruce Berman] (15:53 - 16:27)
You know, there's legislation out in Congress for stronger patents and to kind of restore the system to where it was where, you know, you could actually, you know, license on business terms, you know, fair and reasonable kind of terms and or litigate if you had to and actually win. Should we go back to an era and a configuration like that? Or is that impossible now that we're onto other technologies?

You know, software doesn't necessarily require patents or is patentable, you know.

[Wayne Stacy] (16:28 - 18:12)
And those things will adjust about individual technology areas. You know, originally patents if around software were difficult because there was no prior art. I mean, I was there when that whole world changed.

And the prior art was horrible because no one was publishing anything. There were no patents, you know, and it settled down. The U.S. has also professionalized the patent office. You know, they used to. Twenty five years ago, examiners were wildly underpaid and horribly mistreated. And now it's a real professional organization.

And it's hard to complain about the work that the examining core does, you know, kind of against that that target of what they're asked to do. They're not asked to be perfect. They're asked to be efficient and good enough for the price to get the patent system, you know, the patent started.

Right, right. I think there is a way to go back. Look, I'm a big believer that the injunction is a powerful tool and there's legislation on that.

And I'm going to say the injunction, but I'm going to qualify that by saying a properly written injunction. And it used to be and you see this in Europe, but in the U.S. when injunctions were put out there, the judges were a little bit lazy. Or maybe a whole lot lazy.

They just said, hey, stop selling that product. This idea of apportionment about looking for the smallest saleable unit or something like that never worked its way effectively into the injunction world. So the injunctions were a bigger hammer than they should have been.

Right.

[Bruce Berman] (18:12 - 18:16)
It's a blanket kind of thing. Stop all production, you know, or whatever.

[Wayne Stacy] (18:17 - 19:19)
The judges always have the power to be equitable and kind. It's not really kind. It's equitable.

Hey, you didn't know about this patent or you were sued, you had a good faith defense, you made a bunch of watches. Well, we're going to let you sell those watches. You're going to have to pay a royalty, but you can't sell any more of them with that feature.

Right, right, right, right. And that way you don't get caught with, you know, 25, $30 million worth of product sitting in a container. That's not good for anybody.

So, you know, I'm a big believer that the injunction should be restored as the primary right with some guidance from Congress that the injunction should be focused on the exact infringing component along with equitable remedies for hey, you didn't know about the patents or if you did know about it and it's a willful issue, well, then you get no relief at all. Sorry, you tried to make all those watches and sneak them in. You know, you're not bringing them in.

[Bruce Berman] (19:19 - 19:39)
Wayne, this year or in 2025, I should say, you were at Dolby Labs. You spoke across the Bay at the Dolby headquarters in San Francisco. And you said that you see students pursuing patents without realizing what having them really means.

What did you mean by that?

[Wayne Stacy] (19:40 - 20:14)
Broadly, look, innovators, not just students, any kind of entrepreneur that's learning about patents, kind of hears about it in cycles. You don't learn the whole scope at once. So you just learn about acquiring it.

And if you read the textbooks, what do they say? Well, you've got the right to exclude others. And that's where they go.

Okay, I got to get a patent. Understanding the litigation enforcement licensing end is a lot, not only for students, but for innovators.

[Bruce Berman] (20:15 - 20:19)
It's a hundred percent of something I like to say, but usually the hundred percent is of nothing.

[Wayne Stacy] (20:20 - 20:53)
Very likely, very likely can be. And that's the trouble if people don't understand what is the patent really mean. And I think shows like Shark Tank have been terrible.

Yeah. Yeah. They're like, Oh, do you have a patent?

Yes. I mean, I'm slow to ever ever criticize someone like Cuban who's had such great success, but he always asked that. And I've always wanted to ask him why, how does that impact your decision?

Are you just checking diligence or do you see them actually enforcing that patent? Is that a license issue?

[Bruce Berman] (20:53 - 21:04)
No, that's a really good point. And it reinforces the notion that a patent means so much. And it can and can mean a lot, but most of the time it doesn't mean as much as people think it does.

[Wayne Stacy] (21:05 - 21:11)
I'd say most of the time, you know, outside of the pharmaceutical industry, they've got lots of lawyers. That's right. That's a difference.

[Bruce Berman] (21:11 - 21:22)
More of a one-to-one relationship between a formula and a particular patent. And Cuban in particular, he's not a fan of patents traditionally. So it's kind of kind of interesting.

[Wayne Stacy] (21:23 - 22:01)
I think he understands. Well, I'm just assuming with his business background, he understands what you can do with patents. But he commonly asked that question, you know, how are you protecting in that?

You know, I've debated this or discussed this. I don't know what to debate with others. I wonder why he asked that question.

What does that tell him about the company? Because, you know, he's not going to put a 10 million dollars in to litigate the patent. So if somebody said, I've got a patent and I'm going to sue my innovators, I'm pretty sure I know what all the sharks would be saying.

We're out. We're out.

[Bruce Berman] (22:03 - 22:43)
Yeah, sometimes, you know, it's funny. I know someone in licensing, and he says sometimes this is more product like household appliance and other kind of licensing, which are covered by patents, design and other, you know, utility patents. But he says people come and they want to waive a patent in front of like a potential distributor or partner.

And they think that's going to be great. And they're going to say, OK, we want to talk to these guys. But it's the opposite.

They say they want to. They don't want to have anything to do with you. You have the patent.

You think you're going to use it. You can't use it. And you have a starry-eyed notion of what the market is.

It's not really always about the patent having a patent.

[Wayne Stacy] (22:45 - 24:20)
I'm with your colleague on that. Leading with a patent is a bad idea. And I mean, I go back to a client I had many years ago that had incredible technology, but they were too small to roll it out at the scale this customer wanted.

And the customer said, you know, we love this, but we're going to work with one of these giants to build it ourselves. And I had to get involved at that point in time. Well, when you do that, we're out of business.

And that means we've got this patent portfolio. So we've got to make money one way or the other. Would you find an alternative to that?

So it wasn't a threat, but it was a clear indication that if you put us out of business, now we become an enforcement entity. And we handled it gently. And the company on the other side then went to the giant and had them bias.

And it made perfect sense for everybody. They had the scale. We had the technology.

And I was like, that's the way the system's supposed to work. They saw it. They liked the technology, but they needed it at a larger scale.

They needed somebody that could service it, guarantee 99.99% uptime. And we weren't going to be able to get there. Just the scale, the amount of capital was outrageous.

And the deal worked perfectly. That's the way patents are supposed to work. But they were at the end of the discussion, not the front.

[Bruce Berman] (24:22 - 24:45)
The IP rights, Wayne, still makes sense in areas like software, e-commerce, AI. Young companies don't seem to really covet patents in that area. They feel, you know, do we really need them?

How can we enforce them? What are they going to mean? We can't license.

Are you seeing something like that?

[Wayne Stacy] (24:45 - 26:19)
I hear the discussion a lot. And my disposition is I'm concerned about the value of patents. And again, I spent my life enforcing patents on the innovator side.

So I'm not one of the lawyers that spent all their life defending. I spent most of my hours of my life on the innovator side. And it hurts me to say that I worried about the value of patents.

But every time I say I worry about the value, I'm also cognizant. When you look at Meta and Google, they're building huge portfolios. But they do them for a different purpose.

They're not suing on individual patents. So I'm not ready to walk away from them in these areas, especially these innovative areas that lots of R&D dollars are going into. I'm a little more skeptical around apps and some of the fast-moving software.

Unless you've really got something special, I don't see the value. But in the build out for a lot of AI, there could be some really interesting things going on. But I don't know what those are going to carry forward to everybody that tries to take an AI engine and automate something.

I want to build an AI doc. Well, that's a different issue than building the AI engine and controlling that. Though I do think what we're really seeing is the rise in trade secret litigation, trade secret protection.

[Bruce Berman] (26:20 - 27:14)
Yeah, that's a big deal. Yes, it's really evolving. And that's good and bad.

Some people say trade secrets, it discourages sharing. And you look at things quite differently with trade secrets. But with data, well, we can get into that later.

It's data protected under trade secret. It's not clear. Berkeley, as a university, has a long tradition of innovation and breakthrough work.

I think it's number two rated by U.S. News and World Report, or the IP part of the law school, which is amazing. Second only to Stanford, which has a little different philosophy, as we know. And it's produced many leading scientists, entrepreneurs, Nobel laureates.

Yet some law school faculty, not just at Berkeley, but other places, they tend to be dubious about strong patents and copyrights. How does that happen?

[Wayne Stacy] (27:21 - 29:18)
And it's fantastic to have that debate. So if you look at Berkeley, the thing I really enjoy here before I do that, just to make sure, depending on what you're reading, Berkeley's number one and Stanford's number two. So just so you know, but there is a different approach.

But I think the sheer size of the center here is very different. I've got, I think, 24 professors that are faculty co-directors. Most centers at other schools have two, and so they take on a personality of one or two.

Here, the center has no personality because we have competing views on copyrights, on patent protection, and that generates a really thoughtful debate. So we have people that would be copied left, people that would be copyright. In the patent space, we have people that would be harsh on pharmaceutical, the pharmaceutical industry and around the IP protection there.

And those that are very supportive, and when you start working together, you actually can start finding the overlap. Well, unless people are incredibly extreme, and we don't have those levels of extremeness because their colleague can help balance things out. And so we have a professor that's probably harsher on the pharmaceutical industry than our other professors.

But when you really dig in, it's just our finding is it's not the attack on patents, but an attack on some of the practices used to extend time periods using patents. Yes, yeah. And like, no, that should be a debate we all have and look at and say, wait a minute, is this what Congress intended?

Right, right, right. You know, this extra seven years kind of tacking on at the end.

[Bruce Berman] (29:19 - 29:58)
For the delayed response, pharmaceutical, because it stays in your body 24 hours instead of four hours, they get another patent. Yeah, it's a bit questionable. I've spoken to law school professors, you know, pretty prominent, eminent ones, and they say, I don't know how IP is taught here, but it's not very positively taught.

And you wonder how it gets that way and what the next generation of lawyers is going to think, because they're not exposed in a way that is necessarily, you know, pro-IP in some cases.

[Wayne Stacy] (29:59 - 30:47)
I definitely worry, you know, we bring in, kind of on a regular cycle, a director for life sciences. And the goal is to bring in, you know, newer attorneys that have real interest in any kind of the pharmaceutical, life sciences world, and introduce them into the academy. So we bring them in and hopefully get them a job going out.

And the goal is to present this kind of balance that we have at Berkeley. And in any one person that says they're balanced, I'm always skeptical of. Everybody's got bias on one side or the other.

But if you can put three or four people together, and then all their perspectives generate something new, that's what I love.

[Bruce Berman] (30:47 - 30:51)
And if they can respect one another, too, yeah, that's important.

[Wayne Stacy] (30:51 - 32:15)
And it's good when they're in the same institution, because they have to see each other in the halls. But what I did see, you know, with this life sciences director position, there are definitely some law schools that very much were in the life sciences space of Patton's Kill, and did not want to even talk to a junior professor about, you know, hiring them if their publications weren't in line with Patton's Kill. So they've got one or two professors that teach their IP that are hardcore on that side and want no debate within their school and deliberately put their thumb on the hiring scale.

So they're absolutely squashing academic freedom. And they're the people that say I love academic freedom. But at the same time, what they're saying is I love academic freedom.

And so I select people that agree with me. And with Berkeley's kind of larger group, you can't do that. And I think the schools that are most in danger of introducing particular attitudes are those that have smaller programs, one or two people that are jockeying for positions on publications and want to be the loudest voice on a particular issue causes problems.

[Bruce Berman] (32:16 - 32:30)
Yeah. Wayne, we're getting towards the end of our time. So I wanted to ask you about you joined the USPTO as director in the Silicon Valley office, I think it was in 2020.

What was that experience like? What led to it? And what was it like?

[Wayne Stacy] (32:31 - 35:18)
So, you know, I came in under Andre Yankoo. I loved Andre's approach and what he was saying about, you know, we have to protect innovation. And there has to be balance.

And if you look at his career, you know, he'd done patent litigation for innovators and for, you know, accused infringers, he was balanced because he'd seen it all. So I'm like, I want to be part of that. It was kind of in a good place in my career to step out, go to government for a few years and thinking about just coming back to practice log in.

So went in on that front and then Covid hit. So it kind of made it a little bit challenging. But it also was really interesting for me because everything was done by Zoom.

So distance from Silicon Valley to DC made no difference. We were all the same. And so I got to know people in a way that the geography did not hamper.

And really, really loved that. So I got to be part of that push forward. And really, you know, Deputy Director Peters with Director Yankoo, I thought they really were thoughtful about what they were trying to do with the regional offices, which, by the way, have no definition.

You know, every director kind of thinks about what they're going to do with them. And Andre was using it. And Laura was using it to improve the operations of the patent system and to make sure that voices were being heard that didn't have lobbyists in Washington.

And so I love the fact that they let me come in immediately and start building a dashboard to track who we were talking to from the regional offices. Because one thing I noticed was that DC, anytime they flew out to see somebody, well, they love to fly to Eugene, Oregon to see Nike. They love to fly to Hollywood.

Nobody went to Sacramento. Nobody went to UC Davis to understand what's innovation in the ag industry look like. So with Andre and Laura, they were, we helped build this dashboard so we could see who are we talking to and where are they located based on their innovation.

And I really, really loved that process. But of course, with the new next director, things change. In the regional offices, I don't think are a useful thing unless they have a defined purpose.

And I think that's now why they've been effectively eliminated in any meaningful capacity. You saw the Denver office shut down. It's now in Montana.

[Bruce Berman] (35:18 - 35:21)
Yeah, they talked about a Montana office recently.

[Wayne Stacy] (35:22 - 36:25)
But it's an outreach office. I reported directly to the deputy director. Now there's layers between the regional offices and the deputy director.

I talked directly with commissioner of patents about here's what we're learning from people. Now there's filters. I don't think the regional offices ever will be that effective other than window dressing unless there's some consistency about what they're supposed to do.

And there's so much pushback from Washington on giving up any power that I don't think they'll be able to do much. And that's sad because there's a long ways, both physically and mentally, between what happens in Washington, D.C., and what happens in Silicon Valley. And the stories that you get in Washington, D.C. are from those that have the lobbyists that can walk the halls, not from the small, medium enterprises. Sure.

[Bruce Berman] (36:26 - 36:37)
You received Fulbright to work in Nepal in 24. That must have been an incredible experience. So what were you doing in Nepal with IP and AI there?

[Wayne Stacy] (36:37 - 38:13)
It was a spectacular experience. So they were looking at how did they teach? So it's a faculty of law that oversees the teaching for the entire country, you know, for their primary public institution.

And the goal was to help them understand what they could be teaching going forward and how they prepared their next generation of lawyers, because their next generation of lawyers also turn out to be their next generation of cabinet ministers. There's a close tie. And so if you're dealing with not just their base lawyers, but their lawyers getting their master's degrees and their PhDs.

So how do you blend in this kind of developing economy that's squeezed between India and China on approaches? How do you help preserve local culture by blending them into the world? And Nepal's always had this close tie with the English-speaking world for education.

The U.S. helped build out that system in the 50s. And they just have a different relationship with us on that front. But our models don't fit perfectly.

So we had the opportunity to look and build out really a comparative curriculum to help them understand, here are the options that are happening around the world. Here's what's working. Here's what's not working.

And then using their local professors to figure out how to blend that together. Challenging.

[Bruce Berman] (38:13 - 38:24)
This has been a great way, really. Thanks so much. We'd like to, final question, we'd like to ask on understanding IP matters.

What was your first encounter with IP rights?

[Wayne Stacy] (38:24 - 39:57)
First encounter was the encounter that drove my entire career. I grew up farming and ranching in the Panhandle of Texas. Dad was a farmer, grandfather, my great-grandfather.

I remember seeing in the block of an engine, the tractor engine, it had in the cast, so not one of those little 10 things that was riveted on in the cast, it had a patent number. And that got me interested in it as probably a 13-year-old kid. And isolated farm town, I wanted to do something else besides farming growing up.

Or when I grew up, I loved farming, I loved what I did with my dad. But I'm like, that's interesting. That took me to engineering school.

I went to engineering school with the idea of being a patent lawyer. Because I read about that, I saw that, and then I did research on it, read about it. I remember having to look it up in an encyclopedia.

My son doesn't know what that is anymore. No, no, no, those are gone. So that's what got me there.

I loved science, I loved engineering, I loved math, and probably in the era of LA law, I'm like, huh, I can be LA law plus patents. That's what I wanted to do. A naive dream for a 13-year-old kid in the farm community.

It's kind of silly looking back on it, but I chased it.

[Bruce Berman] (39:58 - 40:20)
Very American dream. I like it. Thanks for being with us today.

This is great. I hope you'll be able to join us again this year. We're going to be in Columbus for the IP Awareness Summit at the center of science and industry, a really exciting place.

I hope you can join us again. I look forward to it.

[Wayne Stacy] (40:20 - 40:21)
It's always great.

[Bruce Berman] (40:21 - 41:18)
Great, that's April 23rd. But for now, this is wonderful. We'll have to have you back on.

There's still more, so much more we can discuss, but that'll be down the road. Wonderful. I appreciate it, Bruce.

Hello, I'm Bruce Berman, the host of Understanding IP Matters, the critically acclaimed series that provides leading innovators and experts the space to share their IP story, the good, the bad, and the incredible. Understanding IP Matters is brought to you by the nonprofit Center for Intellectual Property Understanding with the generous support of its partners and sponsors. Subscribe on the platform of your choice or email us at explore at understanding IP dot org.

Content provided is for informational purposes only and does not represent the views of CIPU or its affiliates. This episode was produced for CIPU by Podsonic. Thank you for listening.