What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

This year, we have engaged several customers in discussions on artificial intelligence and machine learning (“AIML”). As HERE Technologies is a market leader and licensor of location content and platform offerings, many of our customers want to leverage our offerings across many of their business functions for value use cases. To optimise this, they are seeking to use AIML with our licensed assets. In certain use-cases of AIML, the customer can assert ownership to certain elements of our location offerings if we are not careful in how we license those assets. In my discussions with customers, I have been working diligently to ensure we protect our core intellectual property (“IP”) from AIML use cases, while enabling the customer to extract the necessary value from our IP. In one customer case, I had to engage with the customer’s technical and legal teams to understand their technical implementation. Ultimately, we collaborated to ensure they would implement a process that enabled them to use AI in the solution, while ensuring that the IP ownership rights remained with our company.

In my regulatory legal work, I have spent a great deal of time collaborating with our technical teams. Being in-house counsel has required me to become much more of an engineer than I might have ever expected. To be effective in my role, I need to collaborate with our engineering teams – knowing the regulations and law alone is insufficient. The great thing about our organisation is the exposure to different organisational functions. By virtue of having worked on regulatory/product legal matters, I am better suited as a commercial contracts lawyer and negotiator. Being in-house has helped me develop my skills beyond just legal know-how, and has meant less of me becoming a generalist, and more about me becoming a specialist in the many facets of what makes our location business go.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense? 

Recently I had the opportunity to attend a Licensing Transactions in IP Summer Program at the Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany which allowed me to gain a deep understanding of the differences and similarities between European and American IP law. Leveraging that experience and know-how I have been working on a legal playbook to highlight key differences and best practices. This will help our team globally to better negotiate deals and be able to step in for colleagues in a time of need. For example, this playbook has been helping the lawyers in the Americas Region better understand how civil law in Europe works, highlighting the principal exceptions and matters to consider when stepping outside of a common law jurisdiction.