IP Innovators

From Paper Trails to Patent AI: Paul Hunter on 27 Years of Evolutions in IP Practice

• DeepIP • Season 1 • Episode 1

Share episode

In this first episode of IP Innovators, veteran patent attorney Paul Hunter, Partner and Electronics Practice Co-Chair at Foley & Lardner, shares his journey from filing patents using fax machines to leading an AI-accelerated practice. A candid look at how real careers adapt—and thrive—as technology transforms the future of IP law.

👨‍💼 About the Guest:

Paul Hunter is a leading IP attorney with deep expertise in electronics, software, AI/ML, semiconductors, and more. As chair of Foley’s Electronics Practice and managing partner of the San Diego office, he helps companies protect cutting-edge tech through patents and trade secrets.

This podcast is sponsored by DeepIP – your trusted AI patent assistant. For more information, visit: deepip.ai

🛎️ Subscribe to hear more real stories, evolving practice, and the future of IP law.

Steve Brachmann:

Hello, my name is Steve Brachman and welcome to IP Innovators sponsored by Deep IP, your trusted AI patent assistant. This podcast series will feature conversations with patent attorneys about their careers and how technological advances have impacted their daily practice. Joining me today is Paul Hunter, partner at Foley Lardner. Hello, Paul, Thanks for joining us today.

Paul Hunter:

Thank you, Steve. Thanks for inviting me.

Steve Brachmann:

Absolutely. If you can give me a sense, you have been a patent attorney for how long?

Paul Hunter:

So over 27 years.

Steve Brachmann:

And where did you start your career, if you can kind of give a retrospective of how you got into patent law?

Paul Hunter:

So I have an undergraduate degree in electrical and computer engineering from BYU. I then went to law school at the University of Michigan. After graduating from Michigan I started as an associate at Foley in our Milwaukee office. I worked at Foley as an associate for about eight years, became a partner. I then transferred to Foley's San Diego office and I've been here in San Diego continuing at Foley as a partner. I'm the co-chair of our electronics practice. I'm also the managing partner for the office here in San Diego.

Steve Brachmann:

If we can go back to the beginning of your career and just talk about how different daily practice was back when you were an early career patent attorney, given where the state of technology was at the time, so things like filing patent applications and what that looked like then compared to now.

Paul Hunter:

Yeah, absolutely so. There have been changes not only in the technologies that get covered by the patent applications, but the technologies that we use to prepare those patent applications. When I first started, we were using a DOS-based word processing program, wordperfect 5.1. We had to learn all sorts of keystrokes using F commands and we didn't even have a mouse, and it was a very manual process. We used secretaries pretty extensively. I had a dictaphone that I would dictate into, I would do a lot of written editing, and so the entire process was a lot more manual than it is today. I also remember that back in those days, instead of electronically filing patent applications, we had to have someone physically go to the post office and get a date stamp of when the patent application was filed. And sometimes, if we were under the gun with not a lot of time left, we would have to go to a post office that was open 24 hours and make sure we got a stamp before midnight to make sure we got the correct date.

Steve Brachmann:

Being a recent law school grad myself, I'm very familiar with the race to a midnight filing date, but the idea of trying to find a 24-hour post office boggles the imagination right now. Can you give a sense of Paul Hunter in the mid-90s? Walks into his office and has a full day of tasks in front of him as a patent attorney. What is the bulk of your time spent?

Paul Hunter:

Thinking back to that time period, it was interesting. We were all wearing suits and ties and we would walk into our office and we would have a lot of paper. We would have files everywhere and you know, we would have what we would call a trifold for each patent application where you would open this folder and on one side of the trifold you'd have all the communications from the client. Another side you would have communications from the patent office and then a third side you would have the documents that you would prepare. And you know it was very paper intensive. Even though we had computers, we did not have the luxury of being able to send emails with attachments, so we received a lot of faxes from clients and we also did a lot of in-person meetings, where now I very rarely sit in the same room as an inventor, we have Zoom calls and back in the day we spent a lot of time with in-person meetings. We'd fly around the country and sit down with inventors and the whole process was a lot more manual than it is today.

Steve Brachmann:

For patent prosecution, then were a lot of the day-to-day daily tasks different, and what did they kind of focus on for prosecution as opposed to, I guess, drafting yeah.

Paul Hunter:

So patent prosecution was also very much more let's call it a manual process with searching, and there were often a lot of in-person interviews at the patent office. I remember back in the day that there were a lot of law firms that were located right next to the patent office because people were going to the patent office regularly. At that time patent examiners lived in the DC area. There was not this hoteling or remote work that we have now. Back then there was a lot more face-to-face interaction. There was a lot more use of paper and we would have literally rooms full of files with searches and we would have to go through on paper and look for prior art. We didn't have the Google search tools or the electronic programs that we have now, so it was all very, very manual.

Steve Brachmann:

Very manual and a lot of travel, which sounds nice, but I'm going to assume that it was more travel than maybe feels necessary now.

Paul Hunter:

You know absolutely. You think back to those times and you're like how in the world did I go to all these places, visit all these clients? And I prefer what we have now, where it's much easier to reach out to clients. It's certainly a lot more efficient than it was then, although at the same time it was pretty enjoyable to visit clients and schedule dinners and have more personal relationships with them.

Steve Brachmann:

We can still do that now, I guess, just to a more relaxing degree. So if you could take me through your career, paul, from early career associate to currently co -chair of the electronics practice over at Foley and Lardner, yeah, absolutely so.

Paul Hunter:

It's very interesting that my practice evolved along with the development of the technology that I was working to protect.

Paul Hunter:

So one of my clients early on in I think it was 1999, was a company called quackcom and the fascinating technology that they had developed was a voice recognition technology that would allow you to use a regular telephone to call them and then you would ask questions that it would then use the internet to get answers for. So, for example, you would call and say you know, tell me what the weather is going to be like in Denver, colorado, tomorrow, and it would go to the internet, it would find that and then it would tell you. So I guess it was the early days of the smart speaker or Siri or something like that. You know, this concept of using the internet to gather information was very new at the time, but we started integrating it into our practice as soon as we could to find prior art, to find descriptions of technology, to really speed up the process of preparing the patent application and doing the prosecution as well. The greater availability of information really helped us to get better prior art, to get better descriptions and to get better patent applications overall.

Steve Brachmann:

To what degree do you think early adoption of technologies at this time when you're working on clients like Quackcom? To what degree was that adoption critical in your ability to advance your practice?

Paul Hunter:

It was very critical. The more I could learn about developing technologies and the more I could include those in my daily practice. It made my practice much more efficient. It made my clients happier with how quickly things could be. You know it used to be that clients didn't expect to hear back from their lawyer for days, whereas now, you know, most of my clients expect a response within an hour.

Steve Brachmann:

Minutes. Yes, so let's focus on the dot-com era and quackcom. Are there any other experiences from this time that we can delve into? I think we had spoken about you had some experience handling patent applications in the investment banking sector.

Paul Hunter:

Yeah. So there were a number of banks and investment companies that wanted to protect the trading techniques and the algorithms that they were using for doing trades, and it was a window into an area that I really didn't have that much experience in when I was going to school learning about electronics and software, but I learned very quickly that this world of financial investments is heavily math-centric, uses a lot of very challenging algorithms. Now there's a lot of innovation that goes into it. This was when people were first starting to think about high-frequency trading and the concept that if we have our trading machines right next to the stock market, we can make trades faster than other people and we can buy and sell when the stock is going up by pennies or nickels. A lot of these folks were very, very smart people that were thinking about ways to figure out how to buy and sell stocks in ways that would generate lots of money.

Steve Brachmann:

Can you give a timeframe for the years that you were working in this sector?

Paul Hunter:

Yeah, so it was probably the early 2000s. This was when computers were getting used more and more. Computers were faster, there were computer networks, plus a lot of the IPOs that were going on would result in people making lots of money, and so there was a lot of the IPOs that were going on would result in people making lots of money, and so there was a lot of effort into being able to figure out how to trade faster, trade smarter. You know, this boom also resulted in a lot of people wanting to file patents on the technologies that were being developed. At the time, quackcom had a competitor called Tell Me Networks, and there were probably another dozen other companies at the same time that were trying to develop the same kind of technology, and it was very important to them and to their investors that they have protection in the form of patents to keep others from taking the technology.

Steve Brachmann:

So early 2000s and the IP journalist in me goes, those are the days right after State Street, right.

Paul Hunter:

So, State Street was certainly the big case back in the day. It involved a company that was trading using a hub and spokes method and they were trying to get a patent on that and certainly there was a lot of fear about the types of patents that people were trying to get.

Paul Hunter:

I remember seeing patents on you know method of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and all sorts of the reverse auction for Pricelinecom. And you know I had some involvement with a company back in the day called Walker Digital. They were just coming up with ideas that they would start companies with, including Pricelinecom, which was one of their ideas. They had another idea that they patented where you would go to a fast food restaurant and the computer running the register would know they could offer you a drink or some other product and still make money but offer it at a lower amount to round up to the next dollar. So if your total was, you know, $7 and 43 cents, the computer would say, hey, we can still make money by rounding this up to $8 and offer the person a you know a small fry or a or a soda or something like that. And so that that was one of the you know people were just sitting around the boardroom table coming up with ideas and patenting them and starting companies. It was a pretty amazing time.

Steve Brachmann:

And we're still not to delve too deeply into patent law chronology here, but we're currently at a state in time where we have a lot of Section 101 issues, threshold issues with the patentability of these technologies. In your career, have you seen any clarity coming to this area? Has it gotten murkier in your general opinion?

Paul Hunter:

Yeah, absolutely. For a while it seemed like it was a giant pendulum where it would swing from anything and everything is patentable. Anything under the sun is patentable.

Paul Hunter:

Oh my gosh, we cannot have people patenting stock trading techniques. We can't have people patenting peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. You know we've got to prevent all of this and then it would kind of swing back and it really depends on what court you get. If you go to the Northern District of California, you're going to have a completely different view on 101 than if you go and you're filing in the Eastern District of Texas. There is a lot of uncertainty with 101. And there have been efforts to try to clarify that. The courts have tried to clarify it and patent office has, but it's still just such a moving target. The patent office seems to come up with new rules constantly and it is a challenge. You know, to the point where inventions that are clearly related to technology you know encoding for a modem or something like that you see one-on-one rejections on things that in the past you thought well, that was the world of business methods and other things like that. But now it's being used for all sorts of different patent applications.

Steve Brachmann:

Much of my ink has been spilled covering Section 101 developments over the past decade really. So on the flip side, yes, we have patent applications for technological advances which have been rejected. On the flip side, let's talk about the peanut butter applications. Is there a particularly favorite oddball patent application that you've seen that you go? That's not patentable but I'm sure happy they tried.

Paul Hunter:

Well, I did see a patent application on. They called it cross utilization of employees. And so the idea was, if you had a valet that is parking cars at a hotel, you could cross utilize that valet to do baggage delivery. And so there is a patent out there on cross utilization of employees, where the employee not only is a valet, but the employee is also a baggage delivery person.

Steve Brachmann:

Wow, take that scan to email patent. All right, let's take us through the mid-thousands, early 2010s. When did it become clear to you that artificial intelligence was going to have a very deep impact on patent practice?

Paul Hunter:

Well, I mean, I think a lot of people can point to the OpenAI's introduction of ChatGPT as being really just a shocking development in technology. I remember when I first started using it, the ability to, instead of having to, go out to the internet and do a bunch of searching and sifting through websites, the ability to have a computer do that for me was just fascinating. I mean, I could ask it to summarize the state of the art in a particular technology and it would go and find the right websites and it would give me a pretty good description of what you know the current state of art was. And I saw that, as there are so many applications for generative AI, you know, I instantly started thinking of well, how can I use this to speed up generating an IDS, organizing references, coming up with analysis of 100-page patents in seconds?

Steve Brachmann:

So right around the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022? Yeah, was when you were adopting Yep.

Paul Hunter:

Yeah about that time and just have been an explosion of vendors that are out there with all sorts of products. There are companies out there that claim they can draft a patent application from an invention disclosure. I've tested probably half a dozen of those, maybe more, and some of them are kind of clunky, but they're headed in a direction where I think, with the right driver, with an experienced patent attorney driving the AI, with a human in the loop kind of program, you can use the technology to really generate high quality, efficient patent applications and office action responses. It's not a touring machine, it's not something that's going to do it all on its own, a black box that spits out a final product. It's really just another tool, just like the tools that we've seen over the last 30 years, that will help the attorneys to find the right prior art, describe the application very well and come up with high-quality patent applications.

Paul Hunter:

Well, you know, one thing that's really interesting to me is, during the last 30 years, at each stage whether it was the dot-com boom or, you know, the 101 craze at each stage there have been people that have been just yelling and screaming about how you know this is going to be the end of patent law. It reminds me of back in the 1800s, when they wanted to shut down the patent office because everything that possibly could be invented was already invented. And now we have people saying well, examiners are going to get replaced by AI and, for that matter, the attorneys, the inventors, and it's all this. You know, everything's going to hell in a handbasket, kind of thing.

Steve Brachmann:

In looking at different AI tools that have been developed for patent lawyers much like yourself, is there a top drawback that you continue to bump into that? Every time you do, you go nice, try, but I'm going to move on.

Paul Hunter:

Let me list them in order of frustration. Number one hallucinations. You know it started out that hallucinations were a huge issue and they are getting better. But just yesterday I was looking at something that an AI tool proposed and I'm like that's just stupid. And not only that, that's not supported anywhere in the specification, where in the world did you get this from? And so sometimes I feel like I'm having a conversation with a junior, like a first year associate, when I'm interacting with ai, saying, yeah, okay, where did you get this, how did you get it? And all that kind of thing.

Paul Hunter:

The second thing that is a big frustration is you know, whether it's Anthropic or ChatGPT or any of these tools, how often I get you've run out of time or you've run out of space.

Paul Hunter:

You can't give me more information, and I'm sure that a lot of that's due to some economic pressures and all that. That is a frustration that some of these tools say well, I can't really look at more than two references if I'm analyzing an office action, response, hallucinations, limitations on quantity. And then the third one is I think companies, instead of focusing on the holy grail of producing work without a human, they should focus on giving the humans ways to work faster and better. Again, instead of having a black box where, hey, we'll take your invention disclosure and here's a patent application, finding ways to give the human ways to become faster at what they do, to more quickly find the part of the prior art reference that teaches something, or to more quickly identify what part of the claims are missing from, you know, the references. Instead of replacing the human, you know, making the human more powerful.

Steve Brachmann:

Augmenting instead of replacing, right. So then, let's start to wrap up here, because we're getting close to time, and I'm wondering if, paul, we've talked about the state of technology, early career for you. Where is that state of technology now in your practice? How have you adopted AI into patent practice and how has it transformed what you're doing today?

Paul Hunter:

Yeah. So I think the transformation, everything's going faster. Everything's becoming more demanding. Most of my clients regularly think well, you should be able to do this in just a couple of days, whereas in the past it was. You know, we're going to take a couple of days to do a search with an outside vendor and that outside vendor sends some report and then we take a week reviewing it. Now we have tools that the search is done by the computer, the review is done by a human using a computer to analyze it, and everything has to get done much faster. But at the same time I think the quality has gone up tremendously. I think in the past where those manual searches, they would often just miss things, and now some of the high quality AI search tools, if there's priority to find, they're going to find it.

Steve Brachmann:

Can you quantify and I'm wondering if you can do this in, say, a number of patent applications per month? Can you quantify how much more productive you're able to be because of your use of AI?

Paul Hunter:

Yeah, so I think in the 90s, I think, a experienced patent attorney associate would probably spend 40 to 50 hours preparing a patent application, and I think that that is now 20 hours. So I think it's certainly at least 50% more efficient.

Steve Brachmann:

To kind of wrap up here and put a pin in things. What would Paul Hunter, co-chair of Foley's Electronics Practice Group, tell Paul Hunter, the early career associate at Foley Lardner in the mid-1990s? What would he tell him back then?

Paul Hunter:

Yeah, so I think, take the time to find the tools that make your job more efficient. I'd probably also tell him to invest in some companies.

Steve Brachmann:

Probably name a few, yeah.

Paul Hunter:

Yeah, but no, I think it's doing more than just sitting down at your desk and doing things the way they've always been done. You need to think of ways of doing things a little differently. You know, I have associates now that they're still doing things the way that things were done five years ago, and I encourage them test things out, try to use technology and you know, imagine having the internet there and not using it. Well, they're going to use the internet Well. So now think about you know, using these AI tools and making them part of your daily practice.

Steve Brachmann:

Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks, Paul, for taking the time to speak with me.

Paul Hunter:

You're welcome, Steve. Thank you very much. This is a very important topic. I'm very passionate about it and I think that there are lots of good things about the future of the practice of patent law.

Steve Brachmann:

Well, until next time. Thank you for joining IP Innovators. Happy patenting.

People on this episode

Head Shot

DeepIP

Host
Head Shot

Steve Brachmann

Host