Felicia Ellsworth: Welcome to In the Public Interest, a podcast from WilmerHale. My name is Felicia Ellsworth.
Jekkie Kim: And I’m Jekkie Kim. Felicia and I are partners at WilmerHale, an international law firm that works at the intersection of government, innovation, and business.
Felicia Ellsworth: We are very excited for today's episode as we highlight how legal experience, innovation, and public service can come together in meaningful ways. WilmerHale has a long history of pro bono representation and public service, which is a core part of who we are. Over the last two years, WilmerHale has ranked in the top three law firms in the country for the percentage of attorneys devoting more than 50 hours to pro bono work.
To have such a wide scale of pro bono participation among our attorneys, the firm looks to leverage some of our core practice capabilities through meaningful pro bono partnerships. And one of those great partnerships is with The Henry Ford, which supports young innovators by helping them develop their ideas and, with our pro bono legal support, prepare and file patent applications for their inventions.
To talk more about the long-time partnership between The Henry Ford and WilmerHale, we're pleased to welcome Haixia Lin to the show. Haixia is a partner in our intellectual property and intellectual property litigation groups in our Washington DC office. Her practice focuses on patent litigation, post-grant proceedings, and patent prosecution and counseling in an array of engineering fields, including electrical and computer engineering.
Outside of her day-to-day work litigating patents in federal district court, the International Trade Commission and representing clients before the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board, Haixia also leads a team of attorneys at the firm in this partnership with The Henry Ford to help young inventors turn their bold ideas into protected inventions.
We're looking forward to a great conversation with Haixia about how this partnership came together and how it reflects not only the heart of our IP practice, but a core tenant of WilmerHale as a firm, leveraging our skills and expertise to advance innovation and public service.
Haixia, thank you so much for joining us today on In the Public Interest.
Haixia Lin: So excited to be here, thanks for having me.
Felicia Ellsworth: Just to kick us off, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your core practice within the firm's IP and IP litigation work?
Haixia Lin: Yes. I am a patent attorney and that means I spend a ton of my time helping clients think about what to patent, helping them get patents from the patent office. And after patents are granted, I help my clients, whether that's figuring out, , should we be asserting these patents against competitors or defending them against other people, asserting patents against them? Even going full cycle to then challenge patents at the patent office to say they shouldn't have been granted in the first place.
Felicia Ellsworth: For our listeners who may be new to patent law, can you walk us through the process of securing a patent and can you describe what your clients are typically looking to gain from getting patent protection for their inventions?
Haixia Lin: Yeah, there's a whole process and all these rules about what you need so you can get a patent. And it ends up meaning that you work with your patent attorneys to create a patent application and file that with the patent office. And then there's a lot of back and forth at the patent office where you try to figure out, hey, is this invention really innovative enough, such that a patent should be granted?
And the whole goal is to encourage innovation. That's why we have a patent system, because companies, individuals, they put in all this hard work to come up with their innovations. They don't want other people just coming along and copying them and stealing them without doing all that hard work. That's what the patent system is for, to protect that innovation.
Felicia Ellsworth: That's super helpful. With that background in mind, can you describe the firm's work with The Henry Ford and its invention convention worldwide program for young inventors?
Haixia Lin: The Henry Ford runs this amazing invention convention. It's basically an invention competition, but it's got local, regional, national levels. It takes students anywhere from kindergarten all the way up to 12th grade. It has a lot of affiliates that are local to different areas to help them run it. And it's basically a way to really encourage the youth to be interested in innovation and in entrepreneurship.
It involves a lot of skills that the students pick up along the way. How do you identify a problem? How do you solve the problems? How do you learn about something new? How do you think about, is there a market for this? How are you entrepreneurial about it? And then there's a lot of communication involved. How do you talk about your invention? How do you talk about its value, about what was interesting about it? They have to communicate with the presentation materials. They do an oral live presentation about it. And it's just a way for them to meet each other and not just learn about the world, but engage with the world. It's a wonderful program, and the greatest kids are involved too.
Felicia Ellsworth: Can you talk a little bit about the history of the firm's partnership with The Henry Ford? I understand that we've been working with The Henry Ford since 2018, and so I'd love to know the background there and some of the impact that partnership has had.
Haixia Lin: Yes, we get involved at the national competition. We get to pick inventions that we think are really amazing. And we give them an award. And what that award involves is we help them write a patent application, file with the patent office, and then we do the back and forth with the patent office to hopefully get them a patent.
It's a rewarding experience to work with these , to see their creativity. We've so far filed 42 patent applications and received 17 issued patents. The number of issued patents is less, because it just takes forever.
Unfortunately, it can be several years before the patent office will pick up a patent application. There's some delay from when we file it to when it actually starts undergoing the active back and forth process.
Felicia Ellsworth: Outside of your work with The Henry Ford, your practice revolves around a large variety of STEM and innovation-driven work for some of the largest companies in the United States. I'd be interested to hear a little bit about how working with the youth inventors compares to working with the major corporations or maybe more seasoned inventors.
Haixia Lin: What I find really interesting about youth inventors is they're not constrained by whatever the company is trying to make or thinking about the market. They have this perspective where you can tell that they're not only observing the world, but they're engaging with it in a way where they're thinking about, hey, I want to know how that works. What can I do to improve that? What can I do to make people's lives better? What can I do to make this safer, easier? What can I do to help the environment? What can I do to make the world, my community, a better place?
Youth inventors are not thinking about making money. They're not thinking about some kind of deliverable. They're just engaging with the world in a way where they want to be helpful and create something. And it's just a really refreshing perspective to be around. The kids are great.
Felicia Ellsworth: You've had the opportunity to work with a lot of really exciting young inventors as a part of your work. Any one inventor or invention that sticks out in your mind as particularly memorable or interesting?
Haixia Lin: Gosh, so many of them are so good. They all blow me away, but I will tell you one that was really interesting because right when ChatGPT came out, and these large language models sprung onto the scene, we got a student inventor who came through and we filed a patent application for him and he immediately was thinking about, hey, what can I do with this to make the world a better place? He had been volunteering on an app that helps people who are seeing impaired. You would take a picture and then it would connect you to a volunteer anywhere in the world over this app. And that volunteer would help you figure out what was in the picture.
It could be wanting directions somewhere or reading a label, and once those large language models came out, the student inventor said, you know what, we should be using AI for this. And it wasn't so simple as like, okay, I've got the large language model and I have the app and I'm just going to mush them together. He really set out to think about, okay, what do you need besides a phone? What kind of device do you need? Then he also was thinking about, what is my AI model look like? How do I put all these pieces together to make this easy for the users?
And he designed his own AI model. He put together a few different things. He actually negotiated with a company for compute time resources to train his own model. And then he had a working prototype that he was testing, getting a lot of his friends to test. He was tweaking how it worked so it would give the best descriptions. Mind you, he was in middle school at the time. It was very impressive.
And we filed a patent application for him. We're waiting for it to get picked up by the Patent Office to actually start undergoing active examination.
Felicia Ellsworth: That's amazing, middle school.
Haixia Lin: I know. But they're all just amazing. They really are. They really just are out there trying to solve problems. It's just been inspirational work, really inspirational
Felicia Ellsworth: What advice would you give a young person who's got an idea for something that seems really cool but they're not sure what exactly to do next?
Haixia Lin: Well, they should try their hand at this invention convention that The Henry Ford runs. It's a great way to channel that energy. But I think that speaks to a broader point that I would make is the importance of community. Because the invention convention gives you access to resources, it gives you access to other people who are also on this path of wanting to innovate and create something. It gives you access to sponsors who are helping the kids with these patents and it gives you access to a community.
Even if you don't want to do the invention convention, start a club at your school. Say, who wants to do this with me, we're going to get together, because the best things you accomplish in life are things that you accomplish in groups and in teams. So I would focus on trying to create a sense of community around this interest. And honestly, this is probably true of any interest you have. Start a club if one doesn't exist.
Felicia Ellsworth: Great advice as always. Thank you, Haixia, so much for joining us and telling us a little bit more about The Henry Ford and sharing some of your perspectives on how interesting the work they do is and how inspirational the young inventors that you've had an opportunity to work with are. We really appreciate you joining us on this episode of In the Public Interest.
Haixia Lin: Thanks for having me. I love talking about them. They're so inspirational, so I appreciate the opportunity.
Felicia Ellsworth: And thank you to our listeners. If you enjoy this podcast, please take a minute to share with a friend and subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any questions regarding this episode, please email them to us at [email protected].
Jekkie Kim: For our WilmerHale alumni in the audience, if you haven’t already, please join our alumni center at alumni.wilmerhale.com so we can stay better connected. Special thank you to the producers of this episode, Maria Kanevsky and Francesca Shaffer. Sound engineering and editing by Bryan Benenati, marketing by Allison Khan and Alexandra Thimble, all under the leadership of executive producers Jake Brownell, Kaylene Khosla and Arpi Youssoufian. Thank you for listening.
Felicia Ellsworth: See you next time on In the Public Interest.
