What is claimed is:
1. An electrical engineer10, admitted to practice law12 and registered before the Patent Office14, configured to sit with inventors until the invention is actually understood16, and to write it down in terms that hold up years later18.
I build intellectual property functions for companies making hard things — the portfolio, the invention harvesting, the disclosure process, the decision about what gets filed and what stays a trade secret. I have done it from zero twice: once for a process-technology company whose active portfolio went from six applications to sixty in a year, and once for a Fortune 500 that had never filed a patent at all.
I also negotiate the agreements that decide how technology gets built, licensed, shared, and protected. Software and SaaS licensing, joint development, research collaborations, procurement at enterprise scale.
I became an engineer before I became a lawyer, and that order still governs how I work. I read the paper. I sit in the room. I ask what the system is actually doing before deciding what to call it.
The part of the job I have always found most meaningful is the moment the paperwork stops being an obstacle and becomes the thing that lets the work go forward. A claim that holds. A license that opens a dataset. A framework that tells a research team what they can do, not only what they cannot.
A researcher brings you something genuinely new and a date on the calendar after which it becomes public. You have days to understand it — not to summarize it, to understand it — well enough to describe what is novel in language that will survive people looking for reasons it shouldn't. I have spent eighteen years on that side of the table, and I still like it.