Summary
Michelle Lee is back in the technology law mix.
The former director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has accepted a visiting professor role at Stanford University, where she’ll teach a class next winter on disruptive technologies. She plans to explore how IP laws and government policies will shape everything from driverless cars to artificial intelligence to personalized medicine and gene splicing.
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She sounded energized at the prospect of exploring issues such as, “What are the ownership rights of work product created by a computer? What are the liability issues for decisions made by computers?” A Stanford law alum, Lee will act as the Herman Phleger Visiting Professor in Law, a position that has recently rotated between scholars from other universities and industry leaders such as former Intel GC Douglas Melamed. Disruptive Technologies will be presented jointly by Stanford’s law and engineering schools.
Appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014, Lee surprised some observers by staying on at the PTO four months into the Trump administration. She resigned in June, and the administration has since nominated Irell & Manella partner Andrei Iancu to run the agency. Lee declined Tuesday to explain her reasons for leaving. “Nothing further to add on that front,” she said. “I like to look forward.”
She said she was most proud as PTO director of having rolled out some dozen initiatives for improving patent quality. Stronger patents are especially important in an era of post-grant challenges to patent validity under the 2011 America Invents Act, she said. Lee also feels that she left the PTO accountable, transparent and financially secure. “The agency is running well and is therefore able to focus more on the complex policy issues that we have to decide,” she said, before correcting herself. “I say ‘we,’ even though it’s not ‘we’ any more—that the agency has to decide.”
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