Canadian Lawyer InHouse

39 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE JULY/AUGUST 2019 breweries infringing on established marks. "It's just part of doing business, unfortu- nately," she says. Pratt & Whitney is also finding that legal challenges to its IP properties are becoming more common. While the law that established the rules for inter partes review of patents in the U.S. has been in effect since 2012, Bailey says, the aerospace manufacturer is "starting to see more and more of those." "They are difficult processes as a patent holder to defend your patent in, and it's af - fecting how we need to think about how we're protecting our inventions when we prepare the patents in the first place," he says. Even beyond changes in the law, changes in the business landscape and in the field of technology are causing in-house IP counsel to confront new issues and to draw on their ex - perience as they lead their companies forward. While it may seem like a minor point, Bailey, for example, notes that part of his duties include examining the issue of open- source software licensing and determining "whether or not our people are using open source or including it in the product or the software associated with the product. "That's a really important thing to get one's arms around," he says. Moving beyond small details such as open source to a bigger-picture view, Daf - niotis says banks and fintech compan- ies, along with other businesses, are being confronted with artificial intelligence and machine learning and other new cutting- edge technologies and are having to come to grips with what exactly these are and how they can be incorporated into their prod - ucts. She says that while these things may be daunting for businesses, IP counsel are well positioned to offer leadership and guid- ance regarding these new tools. "Companies today and in the last few years have been talking a lot about digital transformation — digitization of products and enhancing their technology to trans - form their organizations. "IP practitioners have actually been in the digital transformation business since the internet became a corporate tool . . . be - cause that's when software patents became relevant to our organizations. That's when L a w D e p a r t m e n t M a n a g e m e n t Master the law. Canada's leading law school offers a graduate degree in four unique streams: Business Law Canadian Law in a Global Context Innovation, Law and Technology Law of Leadership Apply today. Visit gpllm.law.utoronto.ca Questions? gpllm@utoronto.ca ntitled-6 1 2018-05-25 11:45 AM digital copying and the impact it had in the copyright world became relevant. And that's when digital brand abuse became a thing," says Dafniotis. "So, we have the benefit of that experi - ence, as lawyers and as IP practitioners, to be able to look forward and say, 'Well, what else is coming?' "These emerging technologies and the ac- celeration of deployment of these new tech- nologies — whether we're talking about AI or blockchain or so many others — is really an acceleration of issues we've already had a lot of experience with," says Dafniotis. IH

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