Partner Interview - Helen Wallis

What will be the most important market trend affecting your clients’ sector over the next 12 months?

The increase in the use of artificial intelligence. It can be difficult to protect because it often falls into areas that patent offices don’t naturally consider to be patentable. Getting an inventor to explain the invention to you, and how it actually works, can be challenging.

What does quality mean to you?

For an in-house lawyer client, it’s a piece of work that the client is happy to forward on or use as if it was their own work. It has the right content, style and meets all their requirements. For an inventor client, it’s a patent document that they can read, understand and recognise as their invention (without having to dig through legalese).

If you weren’t a lawyer, how would you earn your living?

As an engineer in the R & D department of a technology company. This is where I started, before training as a patent attorney. Learning about new technologies and cutting-edge developments is still the most interesting part of the job.

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