Picking Up Technical Knowledge
posted by Frank Pasquale
As I teach in some technical fields, I often get questions from students about “how much tech do I need to know to succeed in this field?” For example, the Health Law Survey includes many complex medical situations; my seminar Health Information, Privacy, and Innovation covers standards for certifying “meaningful use” of health information technology; and even the intro to IP course tends to include some forbidding patent cases in it. I think this advice from Michal Tsur and Leah Belsky is reassuring:
[S]uccessful tech companies require a variety of skillsets – from design and community management to operations and business development- both at the entry level and in leadership positions. Significant technical skills can also be learned both on the job and outside of traditional academic education. Take Marissa Mayer vs. Sheryl Sandberg. While Mayer, the current CEO of Yahoo may have graduated Stanford with a CS degree, Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, rose through the business ranks at Google, gaining enough product knowledge on the job to become one of the leading operators and innovators in the space.
Having just reviewed the offerings at Coursera this fall, I can definitely vouch for the idea that many tech skills are “on offer” outside the classroom. I’ve also heard from former students who picked up some tech management skills; for example, one learned software programming skills in order to deal with the massive paperwork in a litigation involving many small disputes. I’m also hoping to teach law students how to work with computer scientists and quantitative analysts in a spring course on data analysis and advocacy for attorneys (which I’ll be co-teaching with a professor from my university’s Department of Mathematics and Computer Science). I know that Michigan State & Daniel Katz have really blazed a trail here; I’m hoping to apply some computational legal studies ideas in courses on health and IP law. If anyone has any suggestions on doing so, I’d love to hear them.
X-Posted: Madisonian.
October 15, 2012 at 12:11 pm
Posted in: Teaching, Technology
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Responses (6)
prometheefeu - October 15, 2012 at 8:14 pm
As a software engineer, let me tell you my field is made for outsiders. Many of the best of us picked it up outside the classroom from books and the internet before the latest online education craze. Learning by trying is trivially simple and free. Sure, you won’t become a top software engineer in a weekend, but that’s not your goal either so no worries.
A.J. Sutter - October 15, 2012 at 9:40 pm
“Tech company” is often used as a synonym for a company with a web- or software-based business. There are plenty of industries that rely more on physics, chemistry, chem eng or biochem, for example, where those with more background will often advance more. E.g., at one of my former companies, a global leader in semiconductor manufacturing equipment, the patent lawyers were primi inter pares within the law department, even though the GC was not one himself. It also depends on the stage of the company’s development. Many companies in these more science-y fields will make a patent attorney their first lawyer, who becomes GC. A more mature (and monopolistic) company like Intel, though, might hire an antitrust specialist as their GC, as they did a few years ago.
Even in these more science-based fields, though, it’s sometimes possible to pick up background through extension divisions of local universities. Some courses might be open through the extension division per se: UC Santa Clara used to offer some biotech courses that way (though often with an IT flavor). UCLA Extension would allow you to take even ordinary university courses as a non-matriculated student. The trick there is having the time and money to take a daytime course, though I myself did so while working full-time at a big firm (admittedly, 20 years ago).
The idea that you don’t need technical knowledge to run such a company can be illusory, though. Apple didn’t hire a succession of John Sculleys. And the decline of Sony can largely be traced to the fact that each successive generation of leadership had less technical background than the founders (one an engineer and the other a physics graduate, who was also a brilliant marketer).
Lisa Larrimore Ouellette - October 16, 2012 at 10:17 am
For those without technical training who are interested in patent law, it might be reassuring to know that I think my Physics Ph.D. is of little help in understanding most patent cases. I think you just need confidence in your ability to learn about new technologies, and there are lots of ways to accomplish that. As a first step, start reading popular science articles, such as the News and Research Highlights sections of Nature and Science magazines.
Frank - October 16, 2012 at 10:18 am
Thanks for the comment, prometheefeu–that’s very encouraging.
And Andy, as usual, that’s a good cautionary note. The Harvard extension school offers courses that sound like the UCLA and Santa Clara ones you mention above, at least for comp sci, and some are online.
A.J. Sutter - October 16, 2012 at 12:07 pm
@Lisa: No doubt that’s especially true of a lot of theoretical Ph.D.s, not just in string theory and the like but even ones that, say, model properties of polymers, graphene or other real-world materials. OTOH, aside from the fact that I had my registration by then, I got my first job in industry thanks also to my having taken an undergrad-level solid state physics course: it gave me a lot of useful concepts (and jargon) that directly helped me in interviews and with my writing sample. And my one issued patent to date, as a co-inventor of an electronic musical instrument, was an outgrowth of having fallen asleep reading a group theory-for-physicists book the night before I conceived the invention — so you too may find that even the theoretical stuff will eventually have its uses.
Readers should keep in mind that to write and prosecute patents for anyone other than yourself, you’ll need to sit for the PTO registration exam, and to do that you do need to have either a certain type of degree or a certain number of credit hours in pertinent fields. Without registration, you can litigate patents, which is fine with most people because it’s where the big bucks are — but that’s not getting your hands so directly involved in innovation, if that’s important to you.
Without registration you can also do transactions (licensing, etc.), but law firms tend to regard this area as being pretty worthless, or the kind of thing that anyone can do. E.g., I spent the height of the dot-com era — an historical zenith of transactional practice — in the Silicon Valley office of a Top Five firm; not only was I one of only 2 lawyers in the office doing IP transactions full-time, but there were only 3 such lawyers out of close to 1,000 attorneys globally (the other guy was in Chicago; and we all had some science/engineering background). Even for transactions, being registered or having an advanced degree gives you a lot of credibility with engineer and Ph.D. clients, as well as with in-house law departments.
Lisa Larrimore Ouellette - October 16, 2012 at 10:35 pm
Yes, I should have specified that I wasn’t talking about patent prosecution, for which you must have some technical background. And I was not at all saying that technical training isn’t useful—my Ph.D. work was very applied (I fabricated carbon nanotube transistors and used them for biochemical sensing)—and I think this background has been useful both instrumentally (e.g., in helping me get a clerkship on the Federal Circuit) and in my scholarship (e.g., see Part IV of my article on disclosures in nanotech patents). But I still think that someone who is excited about patent litigation or appellate work or licensing or patent scholarship should not feel that they cannot do this work because of lack of a technical background—for much of this work, someone with a specialized science Ph.D. doesn’t have much of an advantage over an English major who is also a technology enthusiast.
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