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Ian Schick

Ian Schick is a legit genius.

He has a degree in physics, a PhD in nano-optics, and a J.D. After some advanced study and research in optics and lasers, Ian became a patent lawyer. He joined Pillsbury, and with clients up and down the West Coast, he became well-known among software companies for strong patent work. Most recently, Ian has started a company that addresses patent drafting, Specifio.

Ian is one of those guys that brings the goods. He has a casual, no-nonsense tone that is part polished lawyer and part confident engineer, preferring results and data over showy jargon and hype. He had a problem, he set out to solve it, and the results of his efforts were good enough that he is now betting on its utility in the market.

This is my conversation with Ian Schick, co-founder and CEO of Specifio.

Ian Schick: After my PhD, I was a little burnt out from lab life, but I was still very interested in tech and innovation. My first job was with a law firm in Silicon Valley, at Carr and Ferrell, where I got a job as an engineer consultant. And I ended up really liking it. It was great to have my fingers in all these cutting-edge companies.

Ed Sohn: Then you decided to become an attorney?

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IS: Yeah. I went to law school in San Diego, then took a job with Pillsbury. I worked my way up to Counsel with a great practice with a focus on software startup companies. In the last five years, I started to work with more and more AI companies. Most of them were in machine vision, content recognition for image analysis, all basically based on neural networks, which can be applied to many different areas.

I started to think about how those technologies could apply to what I was doing in my practice, and I had this idea for automating the drafting of a patent application. To get more insight, I reached out to a former client I had worked with at Carr, Kevin Knight, now a professor at USC. Kevin had started a company called Language Weaver, where he was the co-founder, CTO and managed the IP portfolio.

I exchanged emails with Kevin with my ideas, and eventually went up to USC and spent a few hours in his office. By the end of the meeting he said, “This looks like it could be real. We should try to build it.”

ES: Let me guess — you built it.

IS: Yes. I was doing most of the coding, and Kevin was my mentor, providing guidance. We have our overlapping areas of expertise, I in patent and he in natural language generation, so we can communicate extremely effectively with each other. That’s the magic behind the founding team.

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Around December of last year, we started getting output that looked like work from my Pillsbury junior associates and patent agents. When I saw that output on my screen, it was a real moment for me.

On January 15, 2017, I resigned from the firm, moved up to L.A. with my wife, and started this company. We are incubating at the USC Information Sciences Institute.

ES: Incredible. And you were doing this while you were practicing all year?  On the side?

IS: Yeah, exactly.  I had these ideas bubbling in my head for a while, and it got to the point where I had to act on this.

ES: That’s a big investment. Most counsel at a large firm who are trying to make partner don’t have a bunch of free time to dabble in computational linguistics and machine learning on the side.

IS: A big part of my motivation was just with turnover that I was dealing with at the lower ranks at the firm.  Usually, at a patent practice, first- and second-years do a lot of patent drafting, maybe third- and fourth-years, but as you get better, you start to leverage and review more than draft. And patent drafting is difficult: it’s an art form, it’s not a natural thing. You must spend time as an apprentice, you have to learn from someone good, and it just takes time.

Finally, after you get people trained up, they may not want to stick with it. It’s the source of burnout for a lot of patent folks.  It’s a super interesting area, learning about new technologies, but a lot of patent drafting is just wiggling your fingers on a keyboard for 20 hours. I kept thinking, if only I had a program that could do at least part of the job.

ES: If the task is that difficult, that nuanced, what made you think you could do it with technology?

IS: I’ve drafted hundreds of patent applications, and most of them were in the software area — one technology domain. Drafting patent claims is where almost all of the intellectual heavy lifting goes. You have to balance inventive concept, business strategy, competing products, prior art, and legal precedent. It takes some real reflection.

But once the claims are prepared, the next step is writing specifications that meet the statutory requirements for the claim.  The specification is a long narrative that explains how to make and use the invention. Going from claims to an application is more of the mechanical writing process. There’s a document plan that is basically the same for most patent applications — an excellent task for computer generated text.

ES: Do you have a product in market right now?

IS: We started pushing it out to the market early in the summer, got some nice feedback from our users, and spent the summer addressing the feedback we received. The big thing we did was getting it more reliable and more enterprise-ready. Recently we were at a conference, the IP Owners Association annual meeting, which is like the royal court of the patent profession, and we were well-received.

ES: Okay, brass tacks. How does this work? I’ve written and spoken about adoption of legal tech and the barriers to overcome when getting lawyers to actually use tech. How does Specifio work?

IS: We are a fully automated system, and importantly, it works over email. I worked at a law firm, I know lawyers can be technophobic, but they all know how to use Word and know how to use email. With our product, an attorney drafts a set of claims, sends it in an email to our system, and our system will draft the spec and send it back to the attorney in a couple of minutes.

Our hope is that it plugs right into the attorney’s workflow. Now the attorney fast-forwards through the process between claims and an application draft. It gets them from 20% done to 80-90% done, eliminating that middle chunk of the job, which is the onion-chopping part of the job and not the value add of these attorneys.

ES: How has it been starting a business?

IS: I’ve worked with startups for 10 years, but once you get on this side of the table, it’s very different. Your day-to-day is basically never the same. As a patent attorney, you are big picture and strategy focused, but as a new startup CEO, you work on those things but also a ton of little things, operational stuff. Building a team of attorneys, paralegals, and secretaries is different from building an engineering team.

Also, I started out as an engineer. It’s really exciting for me to be creating again. I feel super lucky that it leverages my two pasts, as a scientist and as an attorney.

ES: Words of advice?

IS: Your network has never been more important than now. Reach out to people that you haven’t spoken to for a few years, keep that network alive and put high value on it. If I wasn’t working with Kevin and the talented staff at USC, this whole thing wouldn’t be possible.

ES: Last question — do you think your software will shrink revenue at law firm patent practices?

IS: Are we going to replace patent attorneys?  I don’t see that happening. We separate out the creativity and judgment-driven portion of the task, leaving that with the human. It’s the mechanical writing part that we’re trying to automate.

What we’re doing is something like what accountants do with spreadsheets. They used to do everything by hand, but today you’d never pay your accountant to do math by hand, right? In a few years, I’m hoping that attorneys will think it’s crazy to write an application from scratch.

It’s not threatening jobs, it is improving jobs, improving job satisfaction, and capturing more talent. People should be running at 100% all the time, not 30% of the time.

I think it will lead to less burnout and happier attorneys.

ES: Thanks, and best of luck in the future!


Ed Sohn is VP, Product Management and Partnerships, for Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services. After more than five years as a Biglaw litigation associate, Ed spent two years in New Delhi, India, overseeing and innovating legal process outsourcing services in litigation. Ed now focuses on delivering new e-discovery solutions with technology managed services. You can contact Ed about ediscovery, legal managed services, expat living in India, theology, chess, ST:TNG, or the Chicago Bulls at edward.sohn@thomsonreuters.com or via Twitter (@edsohn80). (The views expressed in his columns are his own and do not reflect those of his employer, Thomson Reuters.)

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