Canadian Lawyer InHouse

19 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE JANUARY 2017 easier. I try and fi gure out if there are cre- ative alternatives. I try not to be so much a lawyer and recognize it's a business deci- sion being made," she says. In the D-Wave environment, Rothe knows her positions will be challenged. "Everything you do here is questioned, not in a bad way, but you have to be willing to be questioned and this is not a culture where advice — whether it comes from le- gal or accounting — they don't see you as some kind of oracle," she says. For Rothe, the goal is to provide value and make the lives of her D-Wave colleagues easi- er. When D-Wave did its fi rst sale with Lock- heed Martin, Rothe didn't have the ability to use outside counsel to draft all documents. Instead, she took a lot of time researching and made her own draft agreements. "When we've done these big deals, I've been involved in all of them and went with the sales team to negotiate them," she says. The fi rst deal D-Wave did involved Rothe, the CEO and the sales leader. "My team wants me to be there," she says. Where she brings added value now is helping to identify and protect the com- pany's intellectual property before the in- ventors even think it is important to do so. "With my team being part of the busi- ness, we don't wait for invention disclosures to be submitted and then send them to out- side counsel to fi le the patents. My team is responsible for trying to get people to submit invention disclosures but also for an- ticipating what is inventive about a project and helping to educate the technical team," she says. "They are super smart people and they don't think they've done anything particularly inventive, but what happens is our team will say 'Hey John, that's a great invention or Amanda have you thought of writing that up?" D-Wave scientists have hundreds of de- velopments a year because they are on the bleeding edge of technology. "We can't fi le hundreds of patents a year so my team looks at how we can put it to- gether and get the right mix of strategic claims," she says. Rothe's team will do an initial draft in- house and 90 per cent of the cases that get fi led are done in-house. "We have a weekly meeting of the tech- nology leaders and I go to those meetings and talk about what's going on. If we're talk- ing about different strategies and should we partner with certain people, in terms of deciding what is our business approach, I'm defi nitely involved in that," she says. IH We believe our computer will allow people to do machine learning in a completely different way. TANYA ROTHE, D-Wave Systems KIM STALLKNECHT Canada's leading in-house counsel discuss how they are helping their organizations innovate for the future BROUGHT TO YOU BY COMING TO www.canadianlawyermag.com/canadianlawyer-tv/InHouse Maurizio Romano Janssen Inc. January 9 Matthew Snell IBM January 23 Katie Jamieson Herschel Supply Co. January 3 Tanya Rothe D-Wave January 16 Untitled-5 1 2016-12-06 3:17 PM

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