Andrew Cooper, a top attorney in his field and the Legal Coordinator and Head of Patent Acquisitions for Meta, talks about going from a trailer to a trailblazer by way of Japan and rural South Carolina, lays out just what intellectual property IS, covers non-compete and non-solicitation agreements, the 4 moral imperatives for any leader, shares a LOT of actionable tips for protecting your IP, and addresses how AI has changed things.

Andy, I'm Stephanie Maas, how are you?

I'm well, how are you, Stephanie?

I'm good. I'll ask that super open ended

question start at the beginning and tell me a little bit about

you and your super interesting journey.

Sure. So I am from a small town in South

Carolina called Walterboro. If you are traveling down 95 you

will pass right by it. I had no idea, no concept of what

intellectual property was, or even the practice of law, until

I was in high school and my my father brought home a movie

called separate but equal, and I became exposed to the law and

what lawyers can do. And that began kind of my curiosity to

the practice of law. I ultimately went to college in

Washington, DC and grad school in Atlanta, Georgia, at Emory.

While at Emory, I did a few internships, one with the Coca

Cola Company, and that's really what started me down the path of

IP really exposed me to the concept speed of innovation, and

for companies like Coca Cola, Innovation is key to them

staying at the head of of their their industry, and it should be

something that small business owners think about as well.

After leaving Coca Cola, I went to practice law at sharding and

bacon in the patent litigation group. Moved from from there to

UPS. I was a vice president of UPS, the chief IP council there,

and worked for UPS Airlines. So my ups history was about seven

years, and then I transitioned from UPS to meta platforms,

which is where I am now. And I am the head of patent

acquisitions. And I also do technology transactions, open

source, and AI work for Meta and Mark Zuckerberg.

So not a bad journey from a boy from

Walterboro.

Yes, Walterboro, South Carolina, population of

5000.

Oh, my gosh. Okay, so waltersboro to Okinawa.

Tell me about that.

Oh yeah. So I didn't even touch on Okinawa,

but yes, when I was nine years old, around nine years old, my

dad was stationed in Okinawa Japan, US Marine Corps, and so

we moved to Okinawa, Japan. We were there for four years. A lot

of my formative kind of relationships and and formative

years were there in Japan. We stayed on base, went to

Department of Defense schools, and opened my eyes to the

importance of working with people from all walks of life,

all backgrounds. That core value, I think, in organizations

today, is really important. I also talk about this in the

book, the importance of building open systems, that's

organizations that are able to assimilate information from

various centers of innovation and to incorporate those really

quickly into products and services. The organizations that

we build today in the United States tend to be hierarchical.

They tend to be pyramid structures, better

organizations. Future organizations should be more

like a biological cell, where you have lots of information

coming in and being assimilated and worked through and finally

incorporated into the organism. And those things that are bad,

you kind of kick out, and those things that are good, you make a

part of the system. And that really, I think, started my

journey and thinking about open systems, diversity and inclusion

and how to make organizations stronger.

What a very real experience. Now, if you don't

mind, I'm going to ask you to kind of educate us a little bit,

walk me through this idea of what is intellectual property.

Yeah absolutely. So intellectual property is

really the intangibles around your business that make it what

it is. So when you think about a name brand, human generated

content, these are things, anything that comes out of the

mind of humans can be protected in intellectual property.

Anything that's affixed in a medium. So if you are an artist,

and you conceive of an artwork or design or a painting, and you

put that onto canvas that can be protected, companies, small

businesses, big businesses, they tend to focus on products and

services. They tend to focus on what am I selling and protecting

what I'm selling, but behind that are rights that need to be

protected, and when they're not protected, you run into issues

where people can steal and people can copy. So I. IP is

integral. It's part and parcel of running a good business. So

when I worked at Coca Cola, one of the very first cases that I

had to work on was an inventorship dispute, and at

issue was a patent a novel gas barrier additive that Coca Cola

included inside of its plastic bottles that extends the shelf

life of carbonated drinks. So if you come up with this amazing

container that can keep sodas really physical for a long

period of time, that would be protected by the idea of

patents, on the other side of that, you have trademarks, and

trademarks are really, really powerful because they indicate

source of something really strong. Trademark is Apple, for

example. So an apple, it's a fruit, right? But in the context

of technology, Apple is a company and a company that makes

really great products, and anytime someone sees the Apple

logo, though, or they see the word apple on technology, they

know where it comes from, and they associate a level of

quality with it. So trademarks are really important. And when I

was chief IP Counsel of UPS, one of the largest assets that sits

on the book of business are the brands. This, the logos, slogans

that indicate the source of the good, because there's enormous

goodwill that comes along along with it, some lesser known but

really, really important forms of IP today include copyright

with the advent of artificial intelligence, these AI systems

are trained on content, and content is generated primarily

by people. And so if you were an author and you write a book,

that content is protected by copyright, and so to prevent

others from taking it and using it in ways that you would, you

know, object to. It's important to protect those things. And

companies do these, they create white papers and research and

things like that all the time. So it's really important to

protect, protect that probably the least known and least used

form of intellectual property is, is trade secret. And trade

secrets can be so, so powerful their know how their

confidential business information that gives you a

competitive advantage that other companies don't have. So if you

are a small business, and you have a way of collecting data,

and you hold that data, and no one else has that specific data

set, or, you know, a way of doing something that is better

than the way other people do it. That's a form of of knowledge of

intellectual property that can be protected.

So if you have a sales process that is common

practice in your industry that doesn't really fall under IP.

That's right.

But if you have a process that's unique to your

firm or organization...

It could be a trade secret, but it's you. You

do. You have a process, a sales process, that's different and

unique and provides you a competitive advantage that other

people don't have, you can protect that as a trade secret.

Ok. I know right now it's kind of hot on

the docket, this idea of getting rid of non competes and non

solicitations.

Yes.

So you don't typically hear IP being

protected and non solicits or non competes. How is that a part

of it? Or is it?

Yeah, I mean, non competes and non solicitation

are more on the side of employment law, they really deal

with communications with employees that leave an

organization, and what they can and can't say to folks who

remain inside that organization. So from a non solicit

perspective, you can't go and try to pull or entice other

employees from where you're leaving. On the non compete

side, there's, it's adjacent to IP in the sense that the idea is

you have developed some, some level of knowledge that is

unique to an industry. And if you were to leave a company in

the same industry and go to another company that is a

competitor. You may take that knowledge with you into the

competitor shop and use it in a way that is is detrimental to

the company that you're leaving. So there's, it's it's adjacent

to IP because it does deal with know how. And there are some

rules about what you can restrict from the perspective of

a person that is covered by a non compete so information that

is derived from working within an organization, just as a

result of you being there, you've developed a level of

expertise. Typically, you're not supposed to prevent someone from

leveraging the. Expertise in order to earn a living,

especially if it's in like a market that is that's really

small, like a duopoly. Let's going back to the coke example.

You get Coke and Pepsi very large competitors, a non compete

that is so broad that would prevent any Coca Cola executive

from moving over to PepsiCo and not being able to leverage just

their generalized skills as a as a lawyer or a scientist or a

salesperson, those would probably run afoul and, of

course, this is not legal advice, you know, you'd have to

check with with the lawyer. You know, my experience has been

those typically don't, don't fly, but you can narrowly tailor

non competes in a way, as long as they are, you know, short in

duration and specific to, for example, the work that an

individual has done while they were there. So if you are a an

amazing research scientist that came up with some some novel,

you know, containers that extend the life of sodas, you could

potentially prevent that person from going to a direct

competitor and working on the exact same stuff. They can still

work as a scientist, they can work on other projects, but

typically you could, you can narrowly tailor that way to your

point. There been a push to change non competes at a federal

level. Some companies have gone too far with how they have

sought to restrict the work of employees. And so it's the jury

is still out.

Ok, I want to talk about the book, The Ethical

Imperative, Leading With Conscious to Shape the Future of

Business. Give me, from your perspective, kind of where this

came from, what the intent was.

Sure. So in 2018 I was the vice president,

General Counsel of UPS Airlines, moved to Louisville, Kentucky,

and started the role. I was a position as, hey, this is an

opportunity for you to take on senior leadership large

organization, 20,000 employees. And then covid happened, and so

I began began journaling about the challenges that my my team

were going through, and strategies for helping them to

regain and retain high performance through that crisis.

And I think it's crisis for just about everyone. And so as I was

doing research into like strategies that executives had

used in the past. What I realized was that there are

really four things, four moral imperatives, that any leader has

to really focus on, and that's the first is to work quickly, to

move with speed. If you look at organizations prior to the 1970s

a lot of those organizations, and they were run by Silent

Generation, Greatest Generation, those organizations tended to

divest power, closer to managers, closer to frontline

supervisors, allowed employees to take a more active role in

the decisions of the life of the organization. And so that's

where this concept of of speed as a moral imperative comes

from. It actually relates to our topic of intellectual property,

because the rate of innovation of an organization says a lot

about its speed. Slow organizations tend to be less

innovative. They tend to not engender or encourage the types

of ideas from their employees that allow them to be avant

garde, to allow them to be at the front of the pack, and it

shows in the number of patents that they file many other ways.

The second moral imperative is really to lead with inspiration

to connect the work that we are doing to some benefit to the

world. That is a goal that that we can all share in

organizations like Coca Cola and their work on on water

replenishment organizations like bombas and their work on

providing socks to the homeless. These are critical pieces of the

employee engagement puzzle. Really, it's a puzzle that we

have to solve. And so when I was working through the pandemic, I

realized that by being a part of Operation warp speed, that was

the Trump administration's push to deliver medicines and

vaccines around the world. It gave our employees a North Star.

It was something that said, Hey, we are part of a movement to

save the world. The whole idea, the slogan, it's a patient, not

a package, was really motivating during that time. The third

moral imperative is community investment. Again, going back to

organizations prior to the the 1970s what we found were

organizations that invested in communities heavily. So Hershey,

Pennsylvania would not be a place without Hershey.

Bentonville, Arkansas would not be a place without Walmart, Coca

Cola, even Atlanta. Not be the type of place it was without

Coca Cola and Chick fil A and some of the other companies that

have really opened up their their organizations to

addressing needs of communities. And what we find is that

organizations that identify a place that they want to

transform and go about a strategic vision in doing that

if, even if it's public, or even if it's a public, private

engagement or just a private movement, doesn't matter. The

outcomes of those communities tend to be better than, for

example, places like Walterboro, South Carolina, where there's

been economic distress for for for a long, long time. So the

the Community Investment becomes a really critical piece. And

then finally, the last imperative is openness. Building

open systems is really what inspires organizations, people

within organizations, to do their best work when they

believe that even if there are disappointments, I know that

there's a level of meritocracy built in. I am being heard in

the organization that the leaders care about me in the

organization, these key pillars of being an organization that's

open makes employees perform better. What I have found, just

as an employee, sometimes pair, can be a sense that we are

creating walls between each other, where walls don't need to

exist. And so when we segment ourselves, rather than creating

the places where we can connect, there's a different feeling. So

building bridges, opening doors, creating places where people can

connect and embrace shared humanity become really

important, and I think a lot of it stems from my experience

through the pandemic. Because the truth is, it seemed like the

world changed, but the world didn't change. I think we

changed. I think people, since we were all going through the

same thing at the same time everywhere, people started

asking questions like, do you really care about me? Does this

organization care about me? I know the things that are really

important to me now they're things like, like family and and

so we've just we had this re complete reset on the things

that matter. And so what I'm bringing forward is that that

caring has to be first and foremost, and when people, when

you lead with caring, when you lead with systems that are

welcoming, that create connections rather than create

barriers, you tend to have more effective and high performing

teams.

Yes, that's huge.

I do want to go back a little bit to

operationalizing some of the things that we talked about from

an intellectual property side. How do I go about like best

practices in securing my intellectual property rights? A

few pointers, a few strategies for small and medium sized

businesses, first conduct audits, regularly review and

document the IP assets that are available to you and talk about

patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, even designs,

right? So patents, common utility and design, flavors,

designs. You know how something looks, so look at your talk to

your team again within the context of an open system, bring

people together regional whiteboarding sessions actually

going to folks who you know within your organization that

have great ideas and say, Hey, we want to just sit down and put

some of these ideas on paper. That's the first step in going

about securing those rights that you're looking to secure. And do

it regularly, like if it's quarterly or yearly, that kind

of thing, and keep a book. Sometimes in the old days, when

I started practicing law, people would ask, Hey, where's your

where's your IP book, you know, where's your patent book, where?

And it's just a record of those ideas that have been captured.

The second thing is to to register your your intellectual

property. Now, there's some, there's some IP that you have

protection from the minute that it's created. So copyright, for

example, you create a story. Say you're a content company, and

you have story writers the minute that they put pen to

paper and they create that story. There is copyright

protection, but there are other ways of registering that IP. You

can register a copyright once a work is completed with the

copyright office can file a patent application to protect an

invention. These are things that you should do because they

create enhanced protections for you. Sometimes they are notice

protections that puts the world on notice that you are the owner

of this thing. And sometimes there are there enhanced damages

protection. So if someone does steal your IP or copies your

work, you are able to get, you know, sometimes, three times the

amount of damages as a result of you just registering your your

intellectual property. I thirdly, I really encourage

small. Businesses to engage in NDA practice, and that's non

disclosure agreements. Create a standard non disclosure

agreement and use it routinely. Put NDA provisions in your

employee agreements when they onboard and ensure that they are

they're time bound, and they're reasonable. They relate to the

work that the person is doing, not just with employees, but

also with vendors. I should also say when you have vendors,

they're coming onto your property. Make sure vendors have

NDAs, because you know your vendors walking through they you

know people might have confidential information sitting

on, uh, tables or desks, and it's very easy these days to

just snap a picture with your cell phone of confidential

information. So make sure that your NDAs are in place and are

protecting your information in that way, monitor and enforce

your IP rights. An IP right is no good if it is not protected

and enforced. So if you have copyrights, ensure that you are

sending cease and desist letters when you believe someone is

infringing, that you are engaging with competent counsel

that can negotiate either the takedown of things that are

infringing, ensure that you are looking in policing. Because

what ends up happening is there's a theory in the law that

you know if you don't protect your rights, you lose your

rights. So if you, for example, know that someone is infringing

your trademark and you don't do anything to enforce it. Well, if

you go for a sufficient period of time without doing it, you

may lose some protections. So really look at monitoring

enforcement programs. The last two things, I would say, one,

educate your employees. So training employees on the

importance of IP and best practices in protecting it can

go a really long way to ensuring that you have a strong brand in

the minds of consumers, and that you're also keeping the value

high on your products and your confidential information, your

data, your systems. We at UPS when I was working there, had

routine trainings on this stuff. It also goes a long way in just

ensuring that people know when they have created something

that's worthy of protection. And I've seen this many times.

You've got people out in the field, they're working in an

operating environment, a warehouse or a factory or

something, they come up with some fix to a problem that is

just a practical fix, because they are, you know, necessities

of mother of all inventions, they have created a unique,

efficient way of doing it, and nobody knows about it, except

two or three managers inside that that factory, and it could

be a solution that every factory would could use and create

economies of scale, and we just don't, we just don't know about

it, because employees aren't educated in like who to contact

when they come up with something that's that's good, like that.

And I guess the the last thing I would say is implement security

measures, use, use technical measures like encryption and

access controls to safeguard your IP and your data. This is

really important when it comes to trade secrets, because trade

secrets, if they are, if they're not protected, they can, they

can be lost. Typically, if you lose a trade secret, the damages

are so incalculable, they can't be they really can't be

recovered. Because the idea is, only a few people know the trade

secret, and if more people know the secret, then it's really,

it's invaluable anymore. You know, though, the ultimate trade

secret many people think about is, like the Coca Cola formula

for Coca Cola, right ups. We also had, we had a system called

Orion. It's the reason UPS package cars only turn make

right turns it so it's there's there.....

Are you allowed to talk about that? Did you sign

an NDA?

No, I cannot tell you why, but there's really

important safeguards that you can put in place to protect that

kind of stuff. Creating processes that block access to

things that are critical to the organization are important for

the value of the IP itself and your ability to recover if

anything happens as a result.

Super helpful. This is fascinating. Does it

get old to you?

No, it doesn't. It doesn't get old because every

single day, people are creating new and amazing things. That is

our nature as human beings. We are just so we're tinkerers by

nature, and as a result, I will always have a job. So I'm very

grateful for that. But we are also, we are also very greedy as

humans. We want to protect those things that we that we create.

We want to generate value from them. And so that also is a

motivator. Many, I know, many companies that provide cash

incentives to their employees when they come up with great

ideas or they get a patent. There's also the ability to

generate revenue as a result of of just having intellectual

property. So there are companies that do nothing but license the

things that they have created. So there's. The licensing

revenue that come from, can come from it. And of course, you know

from a trademark perspective, just the mere fact that you know

there are brands, if you see their logo, you know that it's

going to be a huge check associated with it. Creators

across all industries are starting to realize brand value

has been really, really important, and something that

can bring a lot of financial reward. So I continue to be

enamored with the field that I'm in with. The revolution in AI,

we are seeing a new burst of creativity and innovation

happening, and that is also very interesting to see how things

are developing and changing in such rapid succession. There's a

book by a man named Azim Azar. It's called the exponential age,

and he talks about how we are moving so fast that we will that

society will almost be unrecognizable. 1520, years from

now, we'll look back and say, My gosh, do you remember when we

didn't have tires that don't have air in them? And do you

remember when we had cars that were combustion? We don't have

cars with combustion anymore. I mean, heck, I can remember back

when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I had, you know, one of

those T floor set TVs with the the antennas sitting on top, and

everything was kind of analog and grainy. And now, you know,

my computer screen is, is three times, is efficient and clearer.

And, you know, it's just things that are things are changing

rapidly for us, and that also just makes the practice of IP

law very exciting.

Well, your excitement and passion for it

definitely comes through. This has been super interesting.

Thank you so much.

Absolutely. It's my pleasure, and thank you very

much.