In this sixth episode of the Welocalize podcast, host Louise Law is joined by Stephen Carter, International Patent Attorney and founder of The Intellectual Property Works. With over two decades of experience in the field of intellectual property (IP), Stephen has worked with many patents that have required protection in multiple countries, often requiring translation into various languages.

 

Stephen talks about a wide variety of topics, ranging from the role of IP and artificial intelligence (AI) in the design of rugby balls to his first-hand experience with generative AI and ChatGPT. He also delves into the crucial role of accurate translations in patent filing and the growing reliance on technologies such as machine translation (MT) and generative AI in writing and translating global patents.

This episode also explores current trends in the global IP landscape and how attorneys are navigating the complexities of managing multilingual patent portfolios.

 

About the Welocalize Podcast

The Welocalize podcast is dedicated to exploring the world of multilingual communication and the technologies that enable brands to reach global audiences. Guests share their expertise and stories on language, localization, technology, and translation to help brands create the best customer experience.

Further Reading:

How AI is Charging the Patent Process

Machine vs Human Translation: When to Use Which for Legal Translation

 

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Transcript

Louise Law
Hi everyone and welcome to the Welocalize podcast, where we feed our curiosity and talk about the most important and challenging topics on language, localization, translation, AI and much more, helped along by a wide variety of guests. I’m Louise Law, your Welocalize host and in this episode, I’m joined by Stephen Carter, who is a patent attorney and has been for over 20 years. Stephen is the founder of the company, The Intellectual Property Works, which provides global IP consulting for firms, especially technology startups. Thanks Steve, for joining us on the podcast today.

Stephen Carter
Thanks for having me on, Louise! It’s great to be here. 

Louise Law
Today, we’re going to talk about the role technology and AI plays in in global patent journey, the role of translation, and how AI and translation tools can help attorneys manage their international patent portfolio and just harness AI to increase efficiency and drive down costs. But before we get into it, Stephen, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background? How you got into law and your journey as a patent attorney? 

Stephen Carter
As you said, I’ve been in this game for over 20 years now. I think it’s coming up 27 or 28 years and I’m feeling old. I started the engineering degree at university and I did a masters. There was more software related and I got to the towards the end of that and thought ‘what am I gonna do?’ and I-I stumbled across patent attorney as a profession, and well, the rest is history, I guess. Yeah, I did the traditional patent attorney thing for just over 20 years in a couple of London-based law firms. And nearly five years ago now, I decided to try something different and left that kind of large law firm world, and set up my own IP consultancy business. I guess really. And they’re really that’s about getting me back to the work that I love, which is working with the smaller businesses, helping them look at IP strategy more generally. Yeah, and having a lot of fun doing that now. 

Louise Law
IP is everywhere and you know most of us, especially those of us that don’t work in in the legal profession, we we just don’t realize it. And you recently shared a story about IP and rugby balls, a common day object, and how AI has now been introduced into the design of rugby balls, could you share that with us? Tell us a little bit more about that? I thought that was a really good story. 

Stephen Carter
Yeah, I mean, and you’re, you’re right. I mean, our IP is everywhere around us and you know I think we’re getting to the point where AI is everywhere around us these days as well. That was a story from the BBC News, I think, is where I picked it up, but it caught my eye and partly. I’ve done some IP work in relation to rugby balls in the past with more traditional IP work around the way the valves work and that sort of thing. 

Yeah, the latest balls and that they were using in the Six Nations incorporated sensors and use AI to to track the path of the ball to see what speed it’s going. So give them that kind of added layer of I guess performance analysis for the players and the coaches, but also, I guess potentially bringing in more of an immersive experience to the to the viewers as well. So I think, yeah, we’re seeing a lot of that in the sports world where the broadcasters want to layer on more information on top of the on top of the regular television broadcast. 

Louise Law
Another layer of complexity to the  the patent attorney that has to introduce that that level of technology into the patents. We’re here to talk about patents and language. Patents are all about language. You know, it’s all about getting the language right, making sure it’s it’s accurate, and if you’re managing an international patent portfolio, translation is a really key part of the workflow. I know that you know you’ve worked with those in the past and that you’ve worked with a lot of patents that require protection in multiple countries and jurisdictions. And we all know that patent attorneys that you know, the legal practitioners, they’re not translation or, you know multilingual or localization experts. Could you share some of your experiences when you’ve been working with patents and the role of translation in the overall patent journey? 

Stephen Carter
Yeah, as you say, I mean, over the years I’ve managed quite a number of large, international portfolios of patents, so that kind of that language piece, that translation piece, it’s a big element of that. Well, actually, I think one that, as the patent attorney, we sort of forget about sometimes and maybe don’t pay enough attention to, but the way I look at it, I think there’s, you know, there’s different scenarios where you need translations. And I think there’s different levels of risk attached to those scenarios.  

So I guess you know at the kind of most important end is where you’re taking an English language application and you want to file that in a country where English is not the language you can file in, and so the original application that’s gonna be filed in that country needs to be a translation. And in that case, it needs to be a really accurate translation. And I guess sometimes not necessarily just a word for word translation in that scenario, because what you want it to do is to convey the same technical meaning, technical understanding. So it’s really important that you have translators that have that technical understanding as well, and that technical background.  

The other end of the spectrum, you’ve got translations of documents that examiners that patent offices have cited against your application-and there, often it’s enough just to get a reasonable understanding of what that document is trying to tell you. And I guess, you know a less accurate translation or the risk of the translation being wrong is not as high.  

And then there’s other scenarios in between. But I think, say, on, on the whole, I think as patent attorneys we don’t necessarily step back and think about those levels of risk. And at the end of the day, the translation element of a patent portfolio, it can be a big cost element for the client. And so thinking about the most you know efficient way to get a translation that’s good enough for each scenario I think is quite important and it’s something that, as atent attorneys, we ought to probably think about more than perhaps we do. 

Louise Law
It’s interesting what you say its like when you’re working with content in a patent application. It’s do you need it to be absolutely, completely accurate, or do you just need a reasonable understanding of of that? And that’s where we’re in a position where a lot of law firms and corporate councils, they’re looking to AI-enabled tools and machine translation. To help the whole translation flow to help keep costs down, to help reams and reams of content to help being able to translate that without actually using human translators. Or as we know, a lot of the times it’s using machine translation with post editing, so you know getting people to post edit the machine, you know, the output. What would you say are the ups and downs of working with machine translation in legal work. So is it something that patent attorneys, or anyone any legal practitioner, do they embrace that technology? 

Stephen Carter
It’s a good question and I think probably if you’d asked me that question five years ago, I would have said there was a lot of reluctance to embrace machine translation. And you know, a lot of people didn’t trust it, I guess. Basically, where’s I think asking that question today, as you are, I think as a profession, we’re gonna be much more prepared to embrace those kind of technologies and particularly being more kind of customer- or client-focused, recognizing the cost savings that can come about with that while still ensuring the accuracy. And I think yeah, you make a really good point about having the human in the loop. I think certainly where we are today with machine translation and AI, I think that’s still a really important factor that you need. Yeah, personally I don’t think I would trust certainly for those more important translations where you’re translating an application and you want to know it’s right. I’m not at that level of confidence yet where I trust the machine translation or audio and AI translation system todo the full job. I want to know there’s some human, well-qualified human eyes looking at it and making sure that it is as accurate  as I need it to be. 

Louise Law
We certainly can’t talk about AI without talking about the the rise of generative AI. there’s so much talk at the moment, about AI language models like ChatGPT and Bard.  I know people including myself, you know, we are scrambling to test them to see, ‘OK, how can this help me? How can it create efficiency in the situation we’re talking today about, you know, the legal world, you know, could it reduce costs?’  

Could it mean that we’ll just help out with the whole translation process and I think in the world of law, these AI tools like Chat GPT probably raise a whole host of new issues. These rapid developments with these kind of tools, are they a blessing or a curse for attorneys? 

Stephen Carter
Probably a bit of both, if I’m honest, and I think also maybe the more important question is, are they a blessing or a curse for our clients? And probably on the whole, yeah, I’d like to think they’re a they’re a blessing or they’re a kind of a blessing in waiting. 

Louise Law
Of course, yeah.

Stephen Carter
Maybe because I think the the potential for using this kind of technology is to streamline and make the whole patent application process more efficient I think. Yeah, I think it’s happened. I was playing around with ChatGPT myself the other day. I was using it in a scenario where it didn’t matter too much and I was gonna check the results, but it is kind of a useful reminder for me that the state it’s at at the minute we shouldn’t necessarily be trusting it, cause I was preparing a presentation for a group of Med-tech companies that I was gonna be presenting to. And I thought I’ll just ask ChatGPT aome sort of suggestions of recent patent filings in the space and players on that sort of thing. nd it very confidently came back with a nice list of of patents, giving me patent numbers and a brief description of what those patterns covered. 

Louise Law
OK. 

Stephen Carter
And then when I went to check them in the patent databases, the numbers they gave didn’t match the descriptions at all.  I think that highlights the danger, which is not that it gets things wrong, because I think we all expect it’s not necessarily gonna be right the whole time, but it was the very confident way that it gave the answers. but it kind of, you know, believed them itself. And I think that’s the issue.  

But, I think there are ways you can build safeguards around that, and I think, yeah, clearly the ChatGPT interface that that we’ve got access to is a very generic interface. I think if you’re taking that kind of technology and you apply it to a specific scenario and you can build in the right sort of safeguards around that, then it becomes a much more useful tool.  

I did quite a lot of work in in the Med-tech space and digital health space, and you see the same sort of thing with AI and the application of AI in that space, where it’s all about understanding the risks and being able to understand what the consequences of the AI getting it wrong is. And then, yeah, building in the bumpers down the side of the road so that you you don’t go off track too far and and cause some harm. 

Louise Law
So yeah, yeah. 

Stephen Carter
So yeah, so I think the same applies in the patent space as long as we understand what the limitations are. And we can build the right bumpers around it. Then it’s going to be a super useful technology. 

Louise Law
As you say, once the risk and the consequences and the benefits outweigh the risk of this kind of generative AI, it’s just gonna get better and better, isn’t it? So it’s never gonna be replaced, but it’s kind of like using it, keeping the human in the loop alive. And as you say, sort of factoring in the bumpers and how to protect it just overall, you know. 

Before we wrap up, what are some of the main trends happening in the the patent and the IP world? You know, we’ve talked a bit about AI, what else is happening? You know, from a global point of view and in IP. 

Stephen Carter
So I think AI is going to be something that we see more and more and more of. There is some interesting stuff on LinkedIn I was looking at recently where there’s an attorney who’s playing around with what is possible with the sort of ChatGPT type stuff, and he’s built some tools that he’s playing with to help streamline reporting objections from examiners and also help streamline trial description. 

Louise Law
OK.  

Stephen Carter
So definitely I think we’re gonna see more of that. More generally, I mean, yeah, we’re clearly in an economic downturn. You do see clients tightening their belts and I guess being more selective about which cases they take forward in  lots of countries, bearing in mind that you know, again, we talked about it before-the translation costs. But I think that’s also where, you know, some of the advances in translation that we’ve talked about really come into play because if you can cover the same number of of countries and translation being a big element of the cost, if you can do that in a more efficient, cost effective way then it allows the clients to tighten their belts, but still get the geographical cover they want. So I think that’s….and I’m not sure we’ll ever go back. I mean, we’ve seen this before, I think where economic situations cause clients to tighten their belts and the professional responds to that. But those belts never really get loosened again. You know, people like being a little bit skinnier. 

Louise Law
Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. 

Stephen Carter
And yeah, and they want to stay there and they want to push you for more, to be more efficient  in the way you work. And again I think that’s where these kind of developments in AI are going to come into play.  

Louise Law
It’ll just augment what they’re working on. 

Stephen Carter
I think that’s right and I think as a profession we’re just going to have to respond to that and be more efficient and recognize where, particularly sort of on the administrative side of things and the and the more repetitive actions, we will get to a point where machines will be that better than we can, it’s only more efficient, which for me is a good thing because I yeah, it means we can focus on on frankly the more interesting juicy stuff, which is actually working with the businesses to help them put the right strategy in place and understand what the scope of the claims should be and those kind of things. 

Louise Law
Do you have a favorite patent or invention that you kind of really think is cool? 

Stephen Carter
Gosh, I’ve worked on a lot of really what I think is really cool stuff. I mean, you know I’m a bit of a geeky nerd. [inaudible stuttering] But one of the ones that, that, that I’ve worked on in the past that I’ve seen, I guess make the biggest difference in the world, which to me makes it really cool, is a a retinal implant.  

So this was kind of a West Coast US startup business that I was working really closely with, and they had basically a device that gave some sight back to people that couldn’t see at all. Hearing some of reviews from patients that had the implant and the impact and effect it had in their life was, yeah, incredible amazing. So, you know, great to have been involved in that sort of thing. 

Louise Law
Yeah, that sounds good, very worthwhile.  

Stephen, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been really, really interesting chatting to you and good luck with with everything and the business and everything like that. And thanks again for coming to talk to us. 

Stephen Carter
Thanks, Louise. It’s been a been a pleasure; enjoyed your chat.