The IP of the Human Mind

Jennifer Daehler Jones is helping Autodesk think about the future of IP in ways well outside of traditional legal

By Billy Yost

MIDCONVERSATION, IT’S EASY TO

forget that Jennifer Daehler Jones is an attorney at all. It’s a point that she herself makes halfway through explaining the complexities of hypothetically attempting to establish who will have claim to IP if artificial intelligence goes on to create an actual product for a customer of Autodesk, the software company where Daehler Jones has worked for the past thirteen years, most recently as director and senior IP counsel.

What may have been a question relegated to science fiction in the last century is an all too real possibility in the future and a point of passion for the attorney. It’s allowed her to dive deeply into areas most often populated by software developers, project engineers, and think tank philosophers, but it’s part of the IP counsel’s day to day at the multinational company, which creates software for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries.

Daehler Jones says part of the reason she has stayed at Autodesk for more than a dozen years is that underneath every new rock of innovation the company unearths is an entire ecosystem of complex head-scratchers, ranging from the practical to the future of work and what can occasionally sound like the plot of a sci-fi film (ironic, given that most sci-fi films today leverage Autodesk’s software services).

The attorney didn’t initially set out to spend so much time pondering the questions of tomorrow. “I started my career in litigation, and that in itself was a little accidental,” Daehler Jones says. “Like many lawyers coming out of law school, I took a job that seemed the most interesting and would offer