TECHNICAL ACUMEN LEGAL SOPHISTICATION

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POST www.artegislaw.com me the ability to learn and grow.” While she didn’t wind up pursuing litigation as a career, the exposure to IP litigation would be incredibly valuable for the lawyer in coming to Autodesk.

“My prior experience gave me such a grounding in how your best intentions can wind up coming back to haunt you in ways you never anticipated,” Daehler Jones laughs. The young lawyer was also to spend time at a California-based firm doing tech transactional work that would translate well to Autodesk. “I had the good fortune to be working under a partner who really became my mentor,” Daehler Jones says. “Some of the foundational lessons she gave me I still use all the time—things like really knowing your client and working to understand their day to day.”

Coming to Autodesk would provide Daehler Jones with a wide array of challenges that went way beyond the scope of a firm lawyer turned in-house counsel. The highly technical, specialized, and cutting-edge nature of Autodesk’s business required the in-house attorney to develop strong engineering relationships outside of the legal department. “Autodesk’s robust IP portfolios require me to leverage the expertise of our senior technology leaders as well as our patent committee, which is made up of select and senior architects and senior engineering leaders,” Daehler Jones says. “Making sure that we’re thinking hard about the best way to protect those intellectual property assets, whether through patents, publishing white papers, or through protecting something as secret, all comes down to developing and maintaining those important relationships.”

Fortunately, in enlisting Daehler Jones’s own skill set, Autodesk inherited not only the lawyer’s passion for traditional IP matters but also a wide-ranging curiosity that helps ensure legal isn’t just up to speed with the business; it’s actively pursuing the legal future of Autodesk’s most forward-thinking products. While the lawyer insists that it’s only a small component of her wide breadth of responsibilities, Daehler Jones is able to speak on issues like open-source software (OSS) with a level of credibility that seems well outside the traditional legal lanes. The director says companies that understand the value and opportunities of OSS to fuel proprietary software and form a backbone for common protocols will be able to focus more on what competitively differentiates them. “OSS can become a platform that raises all boats,” Daehler Jones says.

The rub, the director underscores, is that those same companies have to nurture and contribute to OSS to continue to drive innovation. “This is an amazing opportunity for everyone involved, as long as the same companies who are utilizing these OSS packages are helping drive that technology and move it forward,” Daehler Jones says.

In spurring innovation, Daehler Jones says legal must also stay abreast of AI and machine learning technologies as they continue to provide new and complex ripples for IP matters. “What happens when we imbue our products with enough machine learning and AI that the products themselves become a designer, and what does that mean for IP rights for our customers?” the lawyer asks.

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