Adventures in the World of Patents, and the Education of a Lawyer
| Publication year | 2023 |
| Pages | 10 |
The SideBar
After 25 years as a lawyer, I did not wake up one morning and decide to become a legal tech entrepreneur. Instead, challenges with document production in my small cases led me to look for a reasonable solution. When I couldn't find an eDiscovery system designed for small firms like mine, I created my own. And once I had taken the plunge in starting a tech company, I found myself on the path to patent our system. What a long, strange trip it's been.
Designing an eDiscovery Platform and Protecting That Design
In 2012, I represented a drug-discovery company in a garden-variety breach of contract case. When it came time to produce my client's documents in discovery, I had around 1,900 emails (including several hundred attachments), along with maybe 100 loose electronic records. The mechanics of producing these ordinary records—which involved printing them (nearly 10,000 pages, filling several banker's boxes), sticking Avery labels with Bates numbers on every page, reviewing them, then typing a privilege log and a spreadsheet index so I could find the documents later in the litigation—almost destroyed my practice. I simply didn't have the resources to spend two weeks of my time and my paralegal's time in document production.
A few years later, my computer-savvy son and I decided to design a solution. Our system would automate converting emails and attachments to PDF, adding Bates numbers, and storing the metadata from the documents (to, from, date, subject, etc.) into an index. When these steps were written into code over the summer of 2017, processing the 2,000 documents from my 2012 case would take less than an hour, instead of two weeks. We realized we could build a company from the prototype code. We partnered with an experienced software developer and launched Discovery Genie.
Soon we had added new features, like a predictive algorithm that can greatly speed up a privilege review (now known as The Predictor), a way to designate important evidence as "key" documents, and a system for adding notes as you review your documents. We realized we were creating an innovative new system for document production, and we decided it would be a good idea to look into patent protection for our system.
I Receive a Crash Course in Patent Law—and Become a Client for the First Time
I'm not a patent lawyer and didn't even take a course in patents in law school, so the decision to apply for a patent threw me into two new worlds—the world of patents, and the world of being a client.
Even for a lawyer, the world of...
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