Experiential education was one of the main reasons I decided to pursue legal studies at Osgoode. Over the past few months, I was lucky to be placed at two very different organizations as part of the IP and Technology Intensive Program. One of my placements was at Alectra Utilities, a large utilities company that serves approximately one million homes and businesses in Ontario. My other placement was at the BEST Lab, a unique initiative at 91ŃÇÉ« for fostering entrepreneurship in students from Lassonde School of Engineering.

During my virtual placement at Alectra, I continued an IP audit started by the previous year’s intern. This involved updating Alectra’s record of registered trademarks using information from external legal counsel. My unique contributions to the audit included drafting memoranda for departments, requesting information that could be helpful to Alectra in trademark opposition and expungement proceedings. I also updated a “Document Log” for the legal team, which is a record of contracts that have IP-related provisions. While reviewing the contracts that I added to the Document Log, I learned a lot about Alectra’s business strategy and its projects piloted by the Green Energy & Technology Centre (GRE&T Centre), the company’s innovation hub. My work at Alectra also included providing feedback on IP-related practices, based on my observations in meetings with GRE&T Centre teams. This open-ended task was a great opportunity for me to apply my legal education and lessons from prior work experiences in a context with real stakes. Alectra is in early stages of developing a robust IP strategy and I was excited to provide a few pointers on IP commercialization. Before my internship ended, I also made sure to ask questions to the in-house counsel about their careers, to have a better understanding of the challenges of their roles.

The BEST Lab may be a smaller organization than Alectra, but it certainly did not lack in interesting work. One of my deliverables for the BEST Lab was hosting weekly drop-in sessions to answer IP-related questions from BEST Lab members. Through these sessions, I met one member who had a fascinating technology and a plan to build a new company. Based on one of their requests, I prepared a video resource for the BEST Lab that describes important elements of IP licensing agreements. Another task I completed at the BEST Lab was drafting their membership agreement and code of conduct, using precedents provided by my supervisors. As part of this assignment, I suggested clauses based on my understanding of the BEST Lab’s operations and goals. My most interesting assignment at the BEST Lab was researching potential solutions to an IP issue in a new program that will soon be launched at the BEST Lab.

91ŃÇÉ« is one of the very few universities in North America that allow students to retain IP they create at school. This means that 91ŃÇɫ’s engineering students retain IP in prototypes they create for their final-year Capstone group projects. An IP ownership issue arises where some students in a Capstone group wish to start a business with their Capstone IP, but some group members do not. All Capstone group members are co-inventors with title to the Capstone IP. Without being assigned the title, interest, and rights of the inventors who are not co-founding the startup, it could be extremely risky to build a business because the non-participating inventors may sell their title to a competitor or make demands for exorbitant compensation after the business is launched. After conducting online research and reaching out to representatives from organizations/initiatives similar to the BEST Lab, I concluded that the most elegant solution may be to facilitate negotiations between the inventors for an IP assignment agreement by providing critical information such as industry standards for compensation structures/amounts.

Despite having to work in a virtual environment during the current pandemic, I am grateful for the experiential education from my internships which cannot be substituted by conventional classroom teaching. If you are a 1L or 2L student interested in the IP field, the IP and Technology Intensive Program is an opportunity you do not want to miss.

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On April 26, 2021, the theme of World IP Day 2021 is “”. Since I founded the IP Innovation Clinic in 2010, the Clinic has helped countless innovators, entrepreneurs, and small businesses to do exactly that. Our students have provided basic legal information to clients who otherwise would not have any access to it. To date, the Clinic has subsidized over $2,000,000CDN of legal fees that would otherwise have been paid by those without access to resources. This past year, the Clinic has expanded its impact through the recently launched , a free legal chatbot which uses a vast database of credible IP information to answer users’ initial IP questions and guide them to the type of legal help they need. This is only the beginning of the ChatBot’s story.

In a critical time of Covid-19 isolation, I aim to ensure that the IP Innovation ChatBot’s content is accessible and attuned to the unique realities of underrepresented communities in Canada’s intellectual property (IP) innovation ecosystem; namely, women and indigenous peoples. Having assisted clients in these underrepresented groups in the IP Innovation Clinic, and through my own research and writing in this area, I have seen first-hand the distinct struggles these groups confront in the traditional IP innovation ecosystem and the distinct challenges they face to bring their innovations to society; from being silenced in their ideation phase to lacking adequate resources and know-how to develop IP strategies attuned to their unique needs and perspectives.

This AI-powered initiative has been launched thanks to the Canadian government’s , and supports its mandate to increase IP awareness and education by making IP information more accessible. These learnings can easily be applied to other areas of the law.

The ChatBot has been realized due to visionary IP Innovation Clinic champions backing our work, Innovation 91ŃÇÉ« at 91ŃÇÉ«, Ontario Centre of Innovation (OCI) at the very outset and Bergeron Entrepreneurs Science and Technology (BEST) Program at Lassonde School of Engineering and Norton Rose Fulbright (NRF) Canada LLP. Indeed, the technical and legal expertise of Partner, Maya Medeiros, and Al Hounsell at NRF, and our Osgoode JD team of students led by Ryan Wong, class of 2021. It is also an honour to work closely with other leaders in the federal government such as the Konstantinos Georgaras, CEO (Interim) at the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) and Jennifer Miller, Erin Campbell and their teams at Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED), who understand and work hard to overcome the challenges Canadian innovators face.

I previously uncovered the various challenges that underrepresented communities face in the IP innovation system and how grassroots initiatives, such as IP legal clinics, can assist in and in more recent work to use the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to build an IP Innovation ChatBot to make IP law more accessible. Going forward, I plan to expand on this foundational and empirical work to build the IP Innovation Clinic and the ChatBot to make the IP innovation ecosystem more accessible.

Ultimately, in an era of increasing technological disruption and lingering societal inequality and pandemic isolation, I hope to influence future legal education and make our justice system accessible to all Canadians.

Indeed, AI applications, including legal chatbots, use machine learning to make the law more understandable, manageable, useful, accessible, predictable, and efficient. Legal chatbots increase access to justice through their wider reach and lower costs. Many underrepresented communities receive either inadequate or no legal help at all. Technology currently cannot provide complex legal advice, but AI-powered online legal services can cost-effectively deliver accessible, basic legal help. Some, like our IP Innovation ChatBot, do so for free. Chatbots can thus democratize access to basic legal services for the underserved, and therefore deserve greater study and adoption.

Since its January 29, 2021 launch, the IP Innovation ChatBot has been a magnet for public use. Several members of the legal community have already inquired to learn how to emulate it. With the information from these analyses, I plan to design and build an enhanced, interactive, dynamic, and accessible portal powered by next-generation artificial intelligence operating on big data curated by our pioneering IP Innovation ChatBot.

The ChatBot will remain a free, sophisticated, and smart online tool, driven by AI and designed to cater to underrepresented and disenfranchised innovators. It will soon house key IP resources and information, leading updates, and links to Canadian and international government IP resources. The ChatBot’s scaled-up national platform will analyse its amassed archive of data and identify common IP knowledge translation problems to devise and anticipate solutions. Adapted for the COVID-19 era and beyond, the ChatBot will support the next generation of lawyers, educate and stimulate innovation from underrepresented communities, provide start-up entrepreneurs with access to IP resources, and be the public’s go-to tool for independent and impartial IP knowledge.

Prof Pina D’Agostino is Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and Founder and Director of IP Osgoode, the IPilogue, the IP Innovation Clinic, and officially since January 2021 the recently launched IP Innovation Clinic ChatBot.

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