Since we’re having coffee, let’s start from the beginning…

Act 1: The Dot-Com Bust

It was nearing the end of 2002, and I’d just spent five years of my youth locked in computer labs and lecture theatres grinding through a double degree in software engineering (with 1st class honours) and commerce – not knowing what I would use all this theoretical knowledge for, but hoping that the juice was worth the squeeze.

Enter the Dot-Com bust…and most of us who’d already locked up jobs with multinational tech giants suddenly found ourselves scouring the job boards and pulling extra shifts on the weekends.

It’s fair to say that I learnt resilience fairly early on in my career.

Act 2: Going to the ‘Dark Side’

After trying my hand at a few contract jobs, I did something that I swore I’d never do – I went back to university. While working full time as a paralegal in a law firm I got myself a law degree, thinking that I’d be a fairly rare commodity as a lawyer who could speak tech. What I didn’t realise at the time was that this new direction would take me down a very different career path.

Working in a general practice law firm I was exposed to some pretty diverse areas of the law – from bitter family law disputes and criminal defence work through to franchising and commercial litigation. But the one that really piqued by interest was intellectual property, probably because it was the closest I could get to tech while still being in the law.

Come 2007, and with most of a law degree under my belt, I took the plunge on a job offer in Melbourne that seemed vaguely aligned with my skillset. I’d never really been aware of a “patent attorney” as a profession, but at the time I desperately needed to get out of Perth. The pay was awful and the training would require me to do even more study, but for the first time in my career I could see a real convergence of my experience/studies.

Act 3: Time for New Scenery

Living and working in Melbourne was a bit of shock to me to me at first. On the plus side people seemed a lot friendlier, but despite all of its “most liveable city” awards Melbourne had a bunch of negatives. The main ones for me were the incessant, cold, grey dreariness of the city (look up Seasonal Affective Disorder) that could only be dulled with copious amounts of red wine, and the significant lack of swimmable beaches.

What Melbourne did give me, and why I can’t speak too badly about the city, was the opportunity to meet my now wife Michele. At the time, she was backpacking through the east coast of Australia and slowly making her way back to her home in the south of Brazil. Despite a pretty significant language barrier, we clicked straight away and the rest is history as they say. But I digress…

After registering as a patent attorney, I started to sink my teeth into some interesting work and, for a time there, I really enjoyed straddling the line between tech and legal. I was helping global tech groups like LG and Boeing secure patents for their latest technologies, fighting global IP disputes for the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer, and getting my weekly fill of crazy backyard inventors and their latest perpetual energy inventions (every patent attorney has one of these, trust me).

The shame of it all was that I realised fairly early on that I couldn’t be a patent attorney for the rest of my career. For the most part, patent attorneys live in a techno-legal vacuum that is devoid of any connection to the commercial realities of the real world.

I was at the crossroads once again.

Act 4: Burning the Candle at Both Ends

On the one hand I had an opportunity to move back to Perth (and to familiarity and sunshine) and take up a patent attorney role with a local firm. On the other hand – and somewhat out of the blue – I was offered a role in Melbourne with one of the country’s leading IP litigation teams. I’ve never been one to take the easy road, so (rightly or wrongly) I submitted myself to more environmental torture and took the gig in Melbourne.

Feeling a bit like Mike Ross bluffing his way into a top law firm (Suits reference), I found myself on a very steep learning curve where 100-hour working weeks were the norm. Not only was I getting up to speed with volumes of IP case law and Federal Court practice and procedure, but I had joined a team that did primarily IP ligation on behalf of generic pharmaceutical companies. If you scroll back to the start, you’ll see that my technical training was in software engineering.

I know people say that TV law shows are nothing like the real world – but that wasn’t my experience at all. While there was no Harvey Specter there to mentor me (another Suits reference), the cranky and vindictive partners, ridiculously long working hours, and office romances were as if they were taken from a Hollywood script.

I guess you could say that my relationship with IP litigation was one of love and hate. I forged friendships with some amazing people while fighting together in the trenches, and many have gone on to become legal superstars who are now scattered across the globe. We worked on complex matters, pushed the boundaries of the law, and set new case precedent when old ones got in our way.

But I can’t help but feel that most of the ‘pressure’ of litigation is manufactured – at least it was where I worked. Sure litigation deadlines can be tight, and judges unreasonable, but in a firm that was notorious for ‘burning out’ its lawyers, partners were quite happy to let us work 100+ hours a week ad infinitum. Why you ask? Simple – because it’s more profitable and because there’s always a fresh supply of naïve lawyers to burn though. If they’d been allowed to put posters on the walls of their offices, I’m guessing Gordon Gekko would have been a popular face around the firm.

Act 5: The Prodigal Son Returns

By late 2012, I’d made the decision to leave Melbourne and start the next chapter of my career.

Once again I had options – but this time, options that could see me leave Australia altogether. Amadeus – one of the world’s leading travel technology companies – had offered me a senior inhouse patent attorney role in Nice, France. When I look back on this opportunity now, I can admit to myself that my interest in the role was 90% Nice and 10% the job.

Turning down the role with Amadeus was hard. After working 100+ hour weeks for nearly 2.5 years, nothing sounded better than relaxing on a beach in the south of France while drafting patents (allow me to embellish a little…). But at the end of the day, I knew that this wasn’t a ‘growth’ opportunity for me. I’d already decided, some years earlier, that being a career patent attorney wasn’t for me (no matter how pretty the surroundings were) and I couldn’t pretend that it was.

The role that I ended up accepting was far less glamourous and took me back to my hometown of Perth and away from litigation (or so I thought). Vowing not to work as a patent attorney again, I accepted a role as a senior lawyer for a large national IP firm. Now Perth isn’t exactly a hotspot for IP litigation, but that suited me fine. I saw it as a great opportunity stay in IP and to learn more about the commercial aspects of deal making, and I wasn’t wrong.

I was lucky enough to work with two amazing bosses (one east coast, one west coast) that gave me my first real taste of complete autonomy. During this time I did everything from court appearances and patent oppositions through to commercial drafting and licensing. Word also got out that I had a lot of patent litigation experience, so I ended up spending quite a bit of time on the Apple v Samsung litigation (on the good (Samsung) side of course).

After a few years I felt as though I had a really good handle on commercial law, but my exposure to M&A and contract negotiation started to pull me in yet another direction – IP strategy and commercialisation. Knowing full well that an IP legal firm wouldn’t have an appetite for this sort of work, I started to explore my options once again. But this time was a little different, because I was creating something completely new.

Act 6: A Side-Step to the Big 4

Using my existing relationships with some of the partners at Big 4 accounting firms, I started to socialise the the idea of them bringing me onboard to start up a new national consulting division focused on IP strategy and commercialisation. I’d love to say that they got it immediately and that I started the next week, but things are rarely that simple.

In the end I had in-depth discussions with three of the Big 4, and it took about 12 months, 14 interviews, and a lot of coffees to convince Deloitte to take on the new service line. If I had my time over again, I probably would have done one thing slightly differently. I wouldn’t have allowed myself to join the tax arm of the business (spoiler alert).

Management consulting was a space that I hadn’t been directly involved with until that point. Sure, I’d done a lot of IP strategy and commercialisation work that I would have called ‘consulting’, but I’d never really labelled myself as a consultant. Going into the business, I guess I expected it to be a little bit like a large law firm, but it was an entirely different beast altogether.

For the most part, accountants know as much about IP as plumbers know about nuclear physics (no offence to plumbers). Most of my first year at Deloitte was spent trying to educate Tax Partners about IP – I’m pretty sure there are dictionaries out there that have my headshot under the definition of ‘masochist’. With the exception of some of the people in the transfer pricing team, I could easily have been speaking a different language for all they cared to understand.

It wasn’t all bad though…

Once I understood that tax accountants weren’t going to be my internal champions, I started to explore the other floors of the building. I found a magical place called ‘Consulting’ where management consultants would sell clients anything and everything, even if they’d never heard about it before. I was their new best friend because it gave them new wares to peddle to their clients and, the best part was, none of the other Big 4 had a similar offering. Others that came a little later to the party included a range of corporate/financial advisory teams that saw creative ways to weave IP into risk advisory, M&A and corporate governance.

All jokes aside, I actually picked up quite a bit of knowledge while working at Deloitte, including treatment of intangible assets for thin capitalisation purposes (if you’re an insomniac, ask me about this sometime). It also gave me an opportunity to further extend my global networks and meet some really smart people, many who I still catch up with for coffee. One of the biggest problems though with Big 4 is the structure – the siloed nature of the internal teams and revenue recognition that actively discourages cross-service line collaboration. The other is the pyramid staffing model that exploits the labour of non-partners and keeps them out of the ‘club’ for as long as possible (or until they burn out and leave).

Act 7: Hanging Out My Shingle

One thing that I really missed while at Deloitte was working with start-ups and disruptive tech companies. You see, when you have to charge out at $900-1,000 per hour, there aren’t a lot of start-ups that actually can afford to see you.

In early 2019, I made the decision to leave Deloitte and setup my own business – bringing together everything that I had learnt over the last 15 years of my career. My experience at Deloitte had taught me one really valuable lesson about big corporates – for the most part, they are incredibly risk averse, incapable of producing any real innovation, and filled with middle-managers that simply turn up to cover their own ass.

A popular saying in the 90s was “nobody gets fired for buying IBM”. While it was primarily used to describe the buying of IBM stocks, the same can be said about ‘buying’ services from the Big 4. Nobody is under the illusion that they are getting the best possible services, or even that they are getting value for money, but at the end of the day “nobody gets fired for for buying <insert Big 4>”.

I realised that I can’t change this behaviour, and that trying to would only get me another listing under ‘masochist’ in the dictionary. Instead, why not help companies that actually want to change – companies that live and die on their ability to innovate, change and adapt – companies that are actually trying to make a difference and not afraid to fail in pursuit of that ambition.

In a roundabout way, I figured out that I only want to work with certain types of companies and the people that make them special. If you contact me for a coffee, I’m hoping it’s because my story resonates with you and because you have that special something that I’m looking for. You don’t need to have invented the smartest widget, or the cure for cancer. You just need to believe that what you’re doing matters, and have the grit to see it through to its end.

There’s a lot more I can tell you, including how I started a plant-based food business and helped build a Mixed Reality creation platform for the education market, but then we’d have nothing to discuss over coffee…