INNOVATIVE
IN THE FIELD would rather negotiate than litigate, cutting headline-grabbing licensing agreements with the Novells, Nokias, and Samsungs of the high-tech world. Licensing agreements allow companies to use intellectual property rights as a kind of currency to trade with one another and make deals in a “business-like manner,” outside courts, said Gutierrez, who took over his post just three years after Microsoft announced it would begin licensing its IP rights to other companies. Bartering IP rights is a new way of doing business in an era of rapidfire technological advances. It speeds products to market faster and spurs innovation, said Gutierrez. Several decades ago, a company might have created every component of its products in-house. Today, a single product from a company can have patented components from hundreds of companies. Gutierrez points to the smartphone, which contains what might have been dozens of devices a decade ago. It’s a phone, a digital music player, a GPS device, a high-definition camera, and video recorder. Apply a software-enabled app and it can be almost anything: flashlight, starfinder, Scrabble board, drawing tablet. All those separate components are developed by separate companies with separate patents, linked through a 21stcentury labyrinth of licensing. “When you get any consumer electronics product in your house—a television set, a stereo—you pull it out, unwrap it, plug it into the wall, and you start using it.You can feel it, see it, touch it. What you don’t see is the intricate web of intellectual property licensing arrangements that preceded the purchase of the device
by you and existed among dozens of Asian, European, and U.S. companies,” said the Miami Law alumnus, who was named the No. 1 most influential global IP market maker by the Intellectual Asset Management Report. Along with a reputation for making deals, Gutierrez has earned a reputation for making a difference in his field. He is founder of the groundbreaking IP Law Institute, a week-long program supported by Microsoft and the Hispanic National Bar Association that introduces Latino law students to the profession and its practitioners. The goal is to boost what he describes as the “severely” low number of Hispanics practicing IP law. Miguel Alexander Pozo, national president of the Hispanic National Bar Association, worked closely with Gutierrez in developing the institute. “His passion for helping others, for advancing the interests of law students, and for empowering the Latino community is unparalleled,” said Pozo. Gutierrez grew up a lawyer’s son in Maracaibo, Venezuela. As a boy, he played with his father’s books on law, history, and political science long before he could read them. At the age of 16, he talked his parents into letting him move to the capital of Caracas to study law at the prestigious Universidad Católica Andrés Bello; on summer break, he enrolled in his first software coding class and “fell in love.” At the Caracas university, he earned two degrees: a bachelor of laws degree and a specialization diploma in corporate and commercial law. Degree No. 3 brought him to America for studies as a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard Law School. He earned his LL.M. there in 1991. Studying for his fourth degree
at Miami Law, Gutierrez, who’d come from a civil law background in Venezuela, immersed himself in the U.S. common law system, taking foundational courses in constitutional law, contracts, torts, and other building blocks of the American legal system. He weighed the two systems, studying differences and commonalities. “For me, every class was an exercise in comparative law.” He describes the environment at Miami Law as encouraging and supportive. Over the course of his studies, his professors became his mentors and his friends. Many remain so today. “That experience is unlike anything I had anywhere else,” said Gutierrez, who has also served as adjunct lecturer at the school and last year was named Lawyer for the Americas by the school’s InterAmerican Law Review. Gutierrez had just graduated from Miami Law when Microsoft started calling. He signed on in 1998 as lead attorney for corporate and commercial legal matters in most of Latin America and the Caribbean. The software giant’s “cutting-edge legal opportunities” have immersed him in everything from international contracts to crossborder counterfeiting, government surveillance, telecommunications, and privacy rights. Before taking the IP lead, he had a four-year stint in Paris as associate general counsel for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The keen legal scholar is ready for whatever comes next, including a new leadership role as Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of the company’s products and services group. “No one at Microsoft has put a limitation on what I am expected to do—and I certainly haven’t put one on myself.”
IN N OVA TIV E AL UMN I
Alumni
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