Canadian Lawyer InHouse

JANUARY 2017 18 INHOUSE hen Tanya Rothe joined D- Wave Systems 11 years ago she was advised to keep a low profi le and focus on managing the patent work for the startup company based in Burnaby, B.C. "When I was originally hired, it was a culture where lawyers were not very wel- come," she says. "I was hired in 2005 and they essentially told me in the fi rst inter- view 'Don't tell people you're a lawyer; we just want you here to manage the IP.' I was a patent agent. So that was fi ne." After she had been with the company for a year, the CEO said, 'This is crazy, why aren't you general counsel?'" The rest, as they say, is history. Over the years, in a culture of high-tech thinkers in an area of development in which few are working, Rothe has demonstrated her abil- ity to cut through the complicated and help translate it all into value in the big deals on which the company has been involved. D-Wave is the only company in the world that has made and sold quantum computers commercially. Its customers include global aerospace company Lockheed Martin, Google, NASA and the Los Alamos National Lab. The company's computers harness quantum physics to perform calculations not possible on regular (classical) computers. As Rothe explains, important problems are getting too big for regular computers. Designer drugs and machine learning re- quire a higher level of computer power. At the same time, classical computers are start- ing to reach their limits. "We are approach- ing the end of Moore's Law," she says. In a regular computer, information can be stored in bits as 0 or 1. Quantum com- puters use quantum bits that can be 0 and 1 at the same time, which means they can effectively process exponentially more in- formation than a regular computer. "We believe our computer will allow people to do machine learning in a com- pletely different way," says Rothe. To help manage the complex deals into which D-Wave is entering, it has two lawyers on staff — Rothe and a second person covering intellectual property who also is a patent agent. A third member of the team has a computer science background and is training to be a patent agent. "I've found it's a lot easier to teach someone how to draft a patent who already understands our technology than it is to train a lawyer who doesn't understand the technology," she says. Rothe is a registered patent and trade- mark agent. Before law school, she ob- tained a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in chemical engineering at the University of British Columbia. After law school, she clerked for Chief Justice Beverley McLach- lin. Prior to joining D-Wave, she managed IP for Ballard Power Systems. She is also licensed to practice law in California — something she thought would be helpful in doing negotiations with U.S. customers. "Over time, what I've tried to do is be- come an ombudsperson as opposed to be- ing a lawyer. The approach I try to take is to not be the department of 'no.' I try and think about how I can make a person's job PROTECTING INNOVATION IN-HOUSE BY JENNIFER BROWN Tanya Rothe, General counsel, D-Wave Systems

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