Two IPs In A Pod
Brilliant inventions, fresh product designs, iconic brand names and artistic creativity are not only the building blocks of successful business - they deliver a better world for us all. But these valuable forms of intellectual property must be protected in order to flourish. We are the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys - the UK's largest intellectual property organisation. Our hosts Lee Davies and Gwilym Roberts chat with entrepreneurs, creatives, patent attorneys and the occasional judge about how patents, trade marks, designs and copyright can improve our lives and solve problems for humanity.
Two IPs In A Pod
Robotics Marvels and Intellectual Property Insights with Tom Bridgwater
Our latest podcast episode dives into the intriguing journey of Tom Bridgewater, CIPA Honorary Informals Representative who transformed his physics and robotics expertise into a rewarding career in intellectual property. Tom shares valuable insights about the challenges of transitioning to IP, the importance of supportive training, and the role of organizations like CIPA in fostering community among members.
Lee Davis and Gwilym Roberts are the two IPs in a pod and you are listening to a podcast on intellectual property brought to you by the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys.
Speaker 3:How are you mate? Here we are in series, whatever it is. We're a few podcasts in now. So do you feel you've found your podcasting legs again? I've fallen off. Oh no, you're not fed up with it, are you mate? Here? We are in series, whatever it is. We're a few podcasts in now. So do you feel you've found your podcasting legs again? They've fallen off.
Speaker 1:Oh no, you're not fed up with it, are you? I'm not fed up with podcasting, but I mean, I think in terms of A gastropod, there you go, it'd be a gastropodcast if your legs fell off. Could you walk on your stomach. That's a thing, anyway.
Speaker 3:Thank you have exciting since the last time we recorded a podcast, because I have okay, well, that's just I have.
Speaker 3:That won't be as exciting as yours, so let's go straight to you well, no, it might be the same exciting thing, because we were at the same event. We had our inaugural council dinner, when we, um, when we take all council members away to a secret location, have, uh, a nice dining experience but also have the opportunity to talk about all things seepa and strategy and stuff like that, and I got the opportunity to stand up and make a few remarks and, um, I might have hammed it up a bit, did you think? I?
Speaker 1:hammed it.
Speaker 3:I didn't notice Mr Willy Wonka under the room at any point, lee oh, it's interesting you say that, because I did actually take on a character, but it wasn't Willy Wonka. Oh okay, was it Robert De Niro? No, have you? Have you ever seen a knight's tale? The film oh yes, I know so I took on the incarnation of jeffrey chaucer in that movie. I don't know why. For some, for some bizarre reason, as I stood up, I thought I'm going to do this paul bettany, wasn't it paul bettany played.
Speaker 1:I'm going to do this in the style of paul bettany in a knight's tale you know, and I don't know why it was, it was kind of jeffrey wonka is where I put it, but nearly jeffrey that's going to be my new online identity.
Speaker 3:I'm going to go and sort of take that now. Oh, jeffrey, jeffrey wonka. Other than that, how?
Speaker 1:you doing. You're right, I'm good. Thank you, yeah, so I didn't share my exciting thing, which is I've been um standing on one leg. Turns out it's more difficult than I thought why I can't do it. The personal trainer said stand on one leg, and then he fell over, so I've got to start working on my leg standing.
Speaker 3:You just you have to eat lots of crustaceans and turn pink, don't you? Before you can do that properly.
Speaker 1:Yes, that would do it. Yeah, in water. Yeah, there we go.
Speaker 3:Water, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, slightly murky water, yeah, but let's not go there. So cool podcast today because, just like SEPA, our student group, the Informals, renews itself on a regular basis and takes on a new leadership, and we've got the new honorary secretary of the Informals with us today, tom Bridgewater. Tom hello, how are you?
Speaker 4:Hey, nice to see you both. Yeah, I'm great. Thanks, and I think you did a very good job of Geoffrey Chaucer in the Knight's Tale. I totally got that.
Speaker 3:So we normally ask our guests to kick off by telling us a bit about them. So I mean, obviously I've seen you appear at council a couple of times now, so we know you exist, but apart from that we don't know a lot about you, tom. So who are you? What do you do?
Speaker 4:Sure. So I started the profession in 2020 right in the midst of lockdown, which was an interesting way to start. I immediately joined the super informals committee, but I'll kind of I'll do the before and then get on to the, to the theory. So before that I was a researcher, so I originally studied physics and then went and did my PhD in robotics uh, in Bristol, and spent, you know, a few years doing the PhD and then a year being a researcher before I kind of thought I want to try something a bit different and I heard about this cool job where you get to be a science lawyer and I thought, oh, yeah, I'll give that a go and applied Luckily, got the place I applied for. I did it very late in the year, so there was only really a couple of places hiring at that point, but luckily they took me on and I joined Venoshipley about four years ago.
Speaker 4:And then, yeah, hopped onto the Super Informals Committee, started as a sports coordinator, so I brought back the Super Five Aside football tournament after the pandemic, which was a challenge. There were a lot of teams dropping out because their HR department said it probably wasn't a good look to be playing football close together just after a pandemic and then moved to the London regional sec role, which was great fun, get to organize lots of socials and meet lots of different attorneys from different firms. And then recently, as you say, I joined. I've kind of taken over from Ashley from last year as the onsec, which is really exciting because now I get to sit actually on big council, which, uh, was actually the main reason I wanted to do the role. It was kind of a curiosity in what big council get up to and I've recently moved firm as well. So it's been a busy year and swapped from, swapped from vena shipley across to lewis silken, which is a law firm rather than a patent firm.
Speaker 3:Quite a different experience imagine there's a huge amount to unpack there, but I'm absolutely convinced that william will want to start with the physics that's fair enough, do you like?
Speaker 1:physics, love physics. It's great, isn't it? What do you say? The robotics side, the phd, was that to the math side, the engineering side, where did you kind of focus?
Speaker 4:I'll give you the the not at all succinct title of the thesis, which was remote characterization of nuclear cave environments utilizing a heterogeneous swarm of autonomous robots, which is gobbledygook, for I sent a bunch of robots into a nuclear environment that was sealed when they built it to come out with a map of what the environment looked like so it could aid in decommissioning the nuclear power plant.
Speaker 4:So they have these rooms in nuclear facilities where there's a lot of sort of pipe work that goes through and it's relatively radioactive in there. So they seal it when they build it and it turns out that a lot of contractors don't exactly follow the specification to the letter. So they don't exactly know what's inside anymore and they have to drill a little hole it's only allowed to be six inches in diameter and then they maintain a negative pressure in there so that nothing can get out. And so they want to know what's inside. And they tasked me with oh, can you think of a way that we could send a heterogeneous swarm ie the robots are different into the into that environment to come out with a map? And I kind of I broke it up into sort of locomotion sensing and control, and my main focus was on the control of the robots.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. I mean, it sounds like the best video game ever. For a start. Why Swarm? Why can't you just send one robot in? Because of?
Speaker 4:the size of the hole. So because it can only be six inches, you've only got a sort of limited sensing capacity that you can. So if you want to send in a big robot, like they did to say, for kashima or something that has, you know, lots of payload, it can sense lots of different things radioactivity, humidity, etc you're you can't, you're kind of scuppered and you kind of want different modalities in terms of locomotion, because you want them to maybe be able to climb, because a lot of pipe work, but also see the floor. So you of you just want them to be able to do different things and also communicate to each other.
Speaker 1:Why can't you just have one really long, six-inch and diameter robot and then I'm done. I'm done after that? That's a fair question.
Speaker 4:They do. They actually did have sort of snake-like robots that they would send in, but they're limited, right, if you've got a really long robot and it needs to move around quite a complex network of pipes, then it's limited in how it can move. So you need the smaller, smaller ones to actually be able to move around in that area. But, to be honest, my focus was on the control more than the, than the locomotion, because it was the bit that was interesting to me and I kind of got to tie my physics into it. So, to be a swarm, you're not allowed to have centralized control. That's kind of the thing that defines a swarm over sort of a group of robots. So the idea is that you get emergent behavior in the robots from implementing simple rules. So I was trying to do a thing where it is interesting.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I can talk about it for a long time. I probably probably should, should, not not bore you too much. But uh, I'll just say this isn't your viva, but go on, yeah, yeah, oh, my viva was actually, it was that was. I'll get back to that. Um, so you, yeah, you go, you go into. My idea was that you could use analogs of you know the fundamental forces of nature to control the robots. So you have. You know, the electrostatic force is a strong, attractive force that draws you to the place where you want to go mapping, and maybe you have a gravitational force.
Speaker 4:In fact, actually I use gravitational force to attract you to the place you wanted to map an electrostatic force to push you away from obstacles, and then a strong nuclear force to kind of keep you as you got closer to the to the thing, give you a real stronger attraction. So all to say, basically, I just programmed these robots to act like particles, which was quite fun is that your idea to do that, or is that a done thing to kind of use?
Speaker 1:I I can see how that I can imagine that's a work. It sounds like quite a creative way of doing it uh, it exists.
Speaker 4:So virtual forces exist for controlling robots, but doing it in that exact manner, trying to do it using the physical forces in that way, didn't exist previously. That's brilliant, leo.
Speaker 1:Stop there thank you for answering a really stupid question, really seriously just then as well.
Speaker 3:I appreciate that I won't pretend that I understood much of that, but it was fascinating. It's always. It's always good to watch two physics geeks go at it oh, he's winning on the geek, sorry what came after that? Then, tom, were you straight into the mode of IP or did you do any real work first?
Speaker 4:Well, it depends whether you consider a research associate real work. I actually, when I when I interviewed for my first job in IP, one of the interviewers asked me how will it feel to have your first real job? To which I I said I won't I won't swear here, but but I told him you know I had had a real job. It was, yeah, I was a research associate. I was studying human-robot interaction for a year before I started. So it was looking at whether or not humans trust robots in the same way that they trust other humans and kind of taking that in looking at how they want a robot to approach risk. That was so. I did that for a year and then entered ip what was wrong with that?
Speaker 1:did you sorry? That's interesting. I mean, a lot of people do say they move from academia you know it's great, but they want to kind of apply a little bit more. It sounds like you were applying your science quite a lot. What was the shift out of academia occasioned by?
Speaker 4:so I felt like there were two aspects one was that I you work on one thing for a long time, and what I'd heard about working in patents was that you get to see lots of different technologies in various fields and you kind of get to learn about lots of different things more regularly, and and so that attracted me away from it. And also because you can only really publish positive results. And I find, I don't know, I found it a little irritating to kind of constantly be asking questions you already knew the answer to because you wanted to publish.
Speaker 4:so you could, like you know the research. You could do a bunch of research that was actually interesting to you, but if you then found out that the answer was no, there's no real journal for negative results. So I found that a bit frustrating and kind of wanted to get away from it right back to you lee sorry cheers, that's sorry.
Speaker 3:Cheers, that's fine. You can interrupt me whenever you want, because I'm only going to ask like boring, very sort of like separee-centric questions, so you can take us wherever you want to go, gwilym. So back to the world of finding yourself in IP. Tom, how did that feel? Talk us through your first few days. What did it feel like to suddenly be working in an IP firm?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it was weird because it was COVID time. So I started in 2020, and I think my girlfriend met my boss before I did. I think I'm allowed to say this because he told me about it, but my partner's a dentist and my boss at the time went in to see the dentist to have a tooth taken out, and it just happened to turn out to be my girlfriend seeing him, and so she spent a couple of hours with him and I spent no time in person with him because it was the middle of lockdown. So that was definitely a weird starting point, but in terms of actually in the profession, it was a huge change. It was going from being quite good at something to having no idea what was going on at all. As you probably both know, it's kind of a trial by fire, in that you're just given work to do and you kind of go figure out how to do it and then get it very wrong, and that is an interesting way to learn, not something I've quite experienced before.
Speaker 1:A lot of entries for the journal of negative results.
Speaker 4:So from that stroke I think on the plus side yeah, a lot, a lot of red lines which I didn't know how to do when I started in the profession. So you know how people put on their CV I'm proficient in word, or whatever. I was not proficient in word.
Speaker 3:I, for the for the first uh, maybe three, four weeks of the in being in the profession, when I was making amendments, I was coloring things in red and underlining them rather than using track changes, because I didn't know it existed, so I sped up quite a lot when someone told me about that there's an interesting insight there isn't there the presumption, the expectation that people come with those skills that perhaps you would consider to be the sorts of things that everyone has, and perhaps also a an indictment of training as it is? Can I go because I was going to?
Speaker 1:yeah sorry, I saw you about to talk, so I no, no, that's fine. I was gonna say I think I'm I think I've might banged on about this a little bit in the past, on this podcast actually which is that we're a funny bunch when it comes to training and it is a it is a very negative experience. You mostly say what you're doing wrong. I mean, we've got the wonderful training manual, lovely positive results there, we've got the informal lectures and we've got loads of really willing attorneys who really want to train the next generation, as it were. But even so, I sometimes feel like it is quite difficult because it's mostly wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. That was it, that was it there? Do that again. She's a strange way. It's a bit like AI training, I suspect, isn't it? You're just going to wait for the reinforcement rather than giving teaching at the outset. It's a bit outcome-driven. What do you think, tom? You're the guest.
Speaker 4:I think that's true.
Speaker 4:I think there's very much.
Speaker 4:You're sometimes trying to figure out exactly why it's wrong and sometimes it can be substantive You've got something wrong with the law but sometimes it can be stylistic, in that there's a lot of red line through how you've written an argument, but actually they haven't changed the substance of the argument, they've changed how it's expressed, just because they prefer a certain way of writing.
Speaker 4:When I started, my boss was fantastic. He was able to put a lot of time aside. We would have, you know, one, two, sometimes even three hour meetings where he'd really I'd write the response and instead of giving me back red line, he would take me through him fixing it, which was great because I could ask why he was changing things, what, what exactly I'd done wrong. Sometimes it wasn't that I'd done something wrong, it was the stylistic thing that I mentioned. And, yeah, I think that was a really positive way of training. And I find I think it really just depends how much time your training partner can actually make for you, because at the end of the day, they have to train you but they also have to do their job and I think it can be probably quite a hard thing to balance.
Speaker 1:Lee, is it time for a patent law school model?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you would look that way. So you know that I come in with an educational background and the first thing that I look for was something that I recognised as being normal sort of training. And I think you quickly understand that we're operating in a world that's very different from most other professions in that we're bringing in people who are already highly skilled and have undertaken sort of significant amounts of higher education to get to the points that they they are in their, in their lives and in their learning firms work in many and varied in different ways, in many different formats, and it would be difficult, I think, to homogenize, if that's the right word, the training in into some kind of school effect. So we're probably doing the best we can with a with a mixed economy training model that we've got. There's lots of things we can do to improve and we talk about these all the time, but that was a.
Speaker 1:That was a long way of saying no, I don't think so, willem no, I mean, I don't either actually, but I think I think it takes too long. I think we could streamline it personally. But uh, I think you might call an intellectual apprenticeship. Uh, in a sense, you know, because you're not learning, you're learning a trade in your own way. It's just a more of a brain trade than a finger trade, but there's so much kind of practical knives to it it's very difficult to get, to get taught a lot of it except through experience. So I do think it's got quicker. So one quick.
Speaker 1:I know I'm banging on today, so I always remember remarking that because I came in right at the end of the old, old training model, which is you spent the first year going down to the library and photocopying stuff. That was pre-intern. This is the time for the internet on. Genuinely it was bizarre. So you go through microfiche and get copies of patents and things and that was literally your training for about a year. It wasn't training at all, it was just. You were just cheap labor. So that that's one of the reasons I think, historically, why the period is so long to train up is because it builds in an entire year of photocopying, which obviously doesn't happen anymore.
Speaker 4:But anyway, does that mean? Did you do a year of photocopying and then sit the the foundation exams or go to one of these Queen Mary style courses? Yeah, I did, queen Mary after a year of photocopying, so you were learning things really from first principles at that point.
Speaker 1:Well, I was going to photocopy. I mean, if they'd had a paper on that I would have nailed it. You know, double-sided stapled, you name it. I don't know if I've ever photocopied something. Now he's feeling old.
Speaker 4:I'm feeling old as old. I'm an old now, apology, no, I do. I, in terms of sort of the, the standardizing of training, I think it's. It's a really hard thing, but I even within firms, because I, when I was at my previous firm, it was really clear that different people were kind of being taught to work in different ways and had different workloads. Right, I didn't have that much drafting, but I had, and I was kind of operating in a way that I'd be given a response to do, I'd do the response, I'd hand it back, whereas other people were kind of given more drafting and more.
Speaker 4:Here's your case number. You're in charge of this case, come and talk to me when you need help, and so, even within one firm, it seems like it's not, it's not sort of completely standardized, and I do think that some level of making sure everyone's get equal training is definitely something we should try and work towards, because you can't you have the exams that say whether or not you're fit to practice, but it you know you can study for those and they're not not that reflective of real, real practice, and so making sure everyone's kind of getting this, a similarish experience, is quite important, I think should we talk a little bit about the sepa experience, because obviously you'd have been also new to the world of something like sepa professional body and I know that that can be it we do in the earliest times in a in a new student's life.
Speaker 3:In fact we've got one next week we have our student induction days, so we do our best to try and enable our students to understand what SEPA is, what it does, how it can support them, how it works sort of more broadly in the best interest of the profession and the IP system. How's it felt being a member of SIPA?
Speaker 4:well, I mean, I I'll be honest, I don't. I never feel I feel like I don't fully appreciate what SIPA do. And I still feel like I don't fully appreciate what SIPA do, which is part of the reason that I wanted to start, as the ONSEC is, so I could go along to these council meetings and get an actual, you know proper, idea of of what's going on in terms, I guess, by super member. I was a student member from the beginning but I didn't really know what that meant. But being an informals committee member meant that I kind of at least had an idea of what we did for students.
Speaker 4:I still don't necessarily have the best idea of what we do for you know, I suppose the terms, fellows, is that is that right? Yeah, yeah, I'm not I that I'm still learning, but in terms of students, I think, I think what we do is great. I think it's really important that we we do all this regional sec and we really kind of divide the regions into quite granular regions so we can provide an opportunity for them to meet each other and socialize. And for me, that was a huge deal when I started because, again, as I said, I started during the lockdown and there was no, no real way to meet people. So joining the committee partly for me was so I could meet people and then kind of help people meet each other, and that's been fantastic, that's one of the Willem knew what Super does because he's a fellow.
Speaker 3:he should know it's a membership organisation. Well done, well done. I've trained him well, it's not, and it's.
Speaker 1:I know what it is. Mostly he just says what it isn't, normally, with some swear words in the middle of it.
Speaker 3:But it's not a representative body it's not a representative body, it's a. It's a membership organization.
Speaker 1:I think it is a representative body. It's not a trade union. That's. It's a representative body, not a trade union. I see that's what it isn't. Also hang on. There's another thing it also used to have a regulatory role, but now it's delegated that yeah, that's absolutely right.
Speaker 3:And um, yeah, the regulatory role was always a big part of c for personality and and now it isn't. But I mean it's interesting, tom, because obviously it's my job to try and help our members understand what it is that we do. And it's probably the most difficult part of the job because you are. You are different things to different types of member at different times and so occasionally it needs something big to come along.
Speaker 3:William's going to get really bored now because I'm going to say cptpp, but it needs. It needs something big to come along, like the cptpp campaign we did over a couple of years, where everyone can recognize that here is this thing that's coming along and it's big for the profession and it could be potentially injurious to us. And CIPA steps in and it does its kind of campaigning and its work and it gets us to a position whereby we're more comfortable with how the UK joining something like CPTPP might look like and it won't impact badly on the profession. Everyone will go, oh, wow, amazing. And then everyone then forgets immediately what SEPA is and what it does, because it will mean different things to different people. That is one of the great but also disturbing things about working in a professional body, I think.
Speaker 1:It's a bit like aircraft pilots you don't really notice until you're about to crash the aeroplane and suddenly someone says where's super when you need them. So I think one of the things I think I've been quite noticeable is how, when there was a crisis, everyone said what's super doing about it? But it is there when you need it. There's doing tons and tons all the time as well yeah, I don't actually even know what the cpp is.
Speaker 4:I don't have the letters down.
Speaker 3:it's easy for you to say I don't think we've.
Speaker 3:I don't think we've got time to talk about CPTPP, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was sort of like a trading bloc that the UK wanted to join and has now in fact joined, whereby the IP provisions of the CPTPP were different enough from the EPC that could have potentially caused some conflict and some issues for us and ultimately, questions about our role in the EPC if we were potentially caused some conflict and some issues for us and ultimately, questions about our role in the EPC if we were committed to the CPTPP. So we just had to navigate that. We had to help government navigate its way through that so that it could join the CPTPP without any unintended consequences. And that's a difficult gig because government just want to get trade deals over the line. That's what they want to do and they don't want a bunch of geeky people coming along and saying, oh yeah, but you really need to focus on this really niche bit of IP law and get that right, otherwise you're going to potentially damage something else.
Speaker 1:But they listened to us and we got there the UN's up in front of all kinds of important select committees or something.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, no, I gave gave evidence to parliament, which was quite cool oh wow, in in the houses of parliament yeah, unfortunately it was on zoom tom, because it was again.
Speaker 3:It was. It was covid times. So, um, which also helps you a little bit, doesn't it? Because you can have some notes discreetly hidden and stuff like that. So there is, there is the advantage that you look like you know what you're talking about, when in fact you've got a screen behind you with lots of statements on it that you know that you need to to get over that would have been a really good idea for this podcast.
Speaker 3:Actually, I should have no, we never do notes so so you are. You are now the new on tech of the informals and a bit like the super president. Each year, obviously, the onset comes in with some sort of thoughts or ideas about what they want to achieve in their time and office what, what's yours? What, what are the biggies on your radar?
Speaker 4:well, one of them is really boring, which is just streamlining the relationship between the informals and the, you know, the big super committee, because I think there's somewhat of a small disconnect in between what we think we do and what big council thinks we do, because I think traditionally there were some parts that were run by the informals, like the ip ball and other bits like that, that we no longer think are part of us, but I think, because of the way it used to be ran, cpa did think were part of us. So we kind of just want to kind of get our terms of reference down and understand what our role is and how we can kind of help our student members and also interact with big seeper, so that we we kind of I don't know have that, have that all down, which is not the most interesting role, but I just I feel like that relationship is really important and that we really want to tie that down. And then the other the other one is I have this idea or desire to bring back dragon boat racing, um, which I don't know. I don't know a lot about it, but I hear, I hear lots of people talking about the old days where there was dragon boat racing.
Speaker 4:It was a really good event and used to row down the thames and I, I, we, I kind of want to see if something like that could be brought back, or at least some. I want to have some new event that we offer, either between us and Big SEPA Council or as an informals event, just to kind of almost. Well, you said it in your speech at the SEPA Council actually is kind of putting members first, and I feel like we could be doing more in terms of networking our trainee members and even maybe integrating that with you know, the fellows. So having a big event where they can all meet each other and have a good day out but also meet other people in the profession, that's kind of what I want to do. So it's two things streamlining and a big old event.
Speaker 3:So really really important policy interconnecting, getting stuff sorted and rowing down the Thames.
Speaker 1:You got it. I've done dragon boating actually. I did it when I went to Singapore and we had a guest, vandita, who's a big fan of dragon boating actually, so she told me to do it when I went to Singapore. It is brilliant, really cool. We should do it. I think we can just decide that now, can't we?
Speaker 3:yeah, so every day is a school day, isn't it? And it's the first time I've been see for over 13 years now. It's the first time anyone's ever said to me cp used to do dragon boat racing. I've never heard that.
Speaker 4:I've never heard that really oh yeah, I wonder where where this is, because I've yeah, I've been spoken to about it by a few.
Speaker 3:It doesn't mean that we didn't used to do it. It just means that no one's ever said it to me.
Speaker 4:No, but in the last 13 years. I would be surprised if it was prior to that, that's interesting, it must be.
Speaker 3:Maybe there were fatalities or something. Perhaps that's why we don't do it. It's kind of scuppered. My plan, which is to ask you about it yeah, no wait, wasted on me, but there will be one or two, as I think. Maybe ask ian, who looks after the journal. There will be some people who've been around for long enough that they will know that this has happened and will possibly even have some gen on it.
Speaker 4:So I'll see what I can find out for you yeah, otherwise it might be a pipe dream, but you know that's fine, you could. If you achieve one of your two goals, then then you're doing a good job.
Speaker 3:Absolutely yeah, that's 50% success. Right, yeah, that's a pass, and arguably the most important 50%, unless, of course, you really want to go dragon boating down the Thames, which I really want to do now.
Speaker 1:Honestly, it'd be amazing, it'd be brilliant, it's a great idea.
Speaker 3:Except in my head I've now got some kind of like tyrene warfare thing going on where we do a bit of ramming and um, but that's probably not not allowed although it could be, could be fun we could do that with sitmar well, I think.
Speaker 4:I think they used to have teams from different. I think the epo entered a team one year. In fact, I was told that the epo entered a team, absolutely destroyed everyone else, and that was one of the reasons that they stopped it, because they got really good at it oh, I've never heard any of this.
Speaker 1:Leave that's any help no, it's just um.
Speaker 3:And now, if we're going to get really, really competitive, I'm thinking about other things. So my uh, a pub not terribly far from me which is on a really good stretch of water, do this for charity annual raft race thing. But the rafts over the years have got more and more extraordinary in their design and construction and the way people go about it. So I'm now thinking how perhaps maybe in addition to or instead of dragon boat racing, we should have some kind of eclectic raft building competition and race.
Speaker 1:That could be quite fun the pattern of things would get soapbox racing, but on water attorneys would get too embedded in the.
Speaker 3:Have we invented something new or novel here? Rather than just cracking on and building it? We can do the whole thing under nda.
Speaker 1:It'd be fine, just to under nda.
Speaker 3:That's not a problem, that's a legal solution well until you put it on the water and then, and then you've got public disclosure you'll be pleased to know, tom, given our little conversation before we started, that we're nearly at 40 minutes, which makes which makes you an exciting guest, an interesting guest oh man, I've made it so but before, before we sort of sign off, there's two things that we normally.
Speaker 3:First of all, we ask you if there's anything else you want to say, because obviously you've told us lots, um, but there might there might be questions we've forgotten to ask you or things that you thought, oh yeah, must get that in. So anything else you want to add?
Speaker 4:I don't think so cool.
Speaker 3:Cool, okay, then.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I guess I haven't mentioned moving firm, but I don't know if that's that interesting.
Speaker 1:I had one question on that, if that's okay, just quickly. Actually, which is just what's it? Like you said, it was a bit different working in a law firm versus a straight kind of boutique IP firm. First of all, why the move for that different model and secondly, what's different?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean I moved because I wanted to do different work. As I said, I didn't get a lot of drafting and we had a client who you could only write your responses in a really specific way, which was fantastic for training. But I kind of wanted to try something a bit different and I suppose, flexed my slightly creative muscle in writing my own arguments rather than writing it in this specific way arguments rather than writing it in this specific way. And another aspect this job kind of came up and my original boss who trained me the guy that I said was great and put aside all that time for me he had moved across to this firm a year before and this opportunity opened up and I saw it was there and I thought, wow, okay, I could have the possibility to work with him and the possibility to do all this new kind of work. And it is fantastic.
Speaker 4:I'd never worked anything infringement before and after having sat the infringement validity paper, which is notoriously difficult, I actually got the opportunity to work on some infringement cases. One of them, without any obviously disclosing any confidential information, was about hoverboards which required us to buy some hoverboards, take them apart, look inside to see whether you know the arrangement of the stuff was infringing, but then afterwards we just got to ride some hoverboards around the office, which was great fun. So everyone there is lovely and you get such a bigger variety of work than just the kind of prosecution that I was doing before. So that was the reason I moved and actually it's been a really really good move, a really positive experience.
Speaker 3:So I think we're there. I think we're there, we're there abouts, but wait. So Gwilym and I have this little thing, tom, where we do a slightly tangential closing question and where we do a slightly tangential closing question and normally I come up with them. Sometimes william comes up with them. I ought to check. Have you got one? I've got one, good, but it's a bit boring. Not boring, but it's a bit obvious, I would say uh have you got one?
Speaker 1:I've got a silly one. Obviously I'm happy to let's go with yours. I'll tell you what one was yeah, okay.
Speaker 3:So so the way this works then, tom, is I'll ask william, I'll then ask you, and then william, I throw it back at me. Um, I haven't actually thought about my answer in advance this time, william. The question is so ordinarily, tom, I've already come up with a really clever answer and I frame my question around it, so that makes me look really either incredibly naturally funny or intelligent or any of those things. Uh, this time around it's just come about because of where we started the conversation on the podcast. So, guillem, I was wondering, um, if there's anything in your life that sort of like frustrates you, annoys you, um, grates with you, and if you could invent yourself a little micro robot to um to do it instead, what, what would that thing be?
Speaker 1:yeah, that's my question, uh, but but um robots, the only difference thing of robots swarm, so I think okay let's, let's go with the swarm.
Speaker 3:That makes it even more difficult for me. Tom tom obviously can't answer this from a nuclear perspective.
Speaker 1:It has to be, something else and I mean I think, I mean I'm not convinced I wouldn't want just a 20 foot six inch wide robot as well. That's, that's another option. But if I'm gonna have a swarm, a dishwasher swarm, in back it, clear it.
Speaker 3:I'd have one stacking robot because you're doing the washing, because I'm, because your dishwasher does that.
Speaker 1:You know that yeah yeah, they're stacking and unstacking. So, one week, gravitationally attracted in gravitationally, bring the plates and everything to the right place. Another one be, and it's just as if you repulsed out with all the, all the clean stuff. And there'll be a third one which is to put your way, which be gravitationally attracted to the drawers to put them all away. And then you'd need a special one, I reckon, for cutlery. That's a swarm. That's four already, and I'd love to see some emergent behaviors because, as far as I'm concerned, I'd love to see how they actually if it's anything like the emergent behaviors in my family, when we're doing a dishwasher, they just yell at each other. I've been paying attention, by the way paying attention.
Speaker 4:That was, that was that was.
Speaker 3:You could write a thesis on that well, so what would you do to make your life immediately better? Tom, and obviously, knowing that this is your expertise, you're gonna have a cracker.
Speaker 4:So well, I well the problem is there already exists a solution to the problem I have, which is I hate mopping and hoovering, and there already exists mopping and hoovering robots.
Speaker 3:So that's the actual, honest answer.
Speaker 4:But if I I was going to invent something, which I think was the kind of core of the question, something to help with the cat, something to our cat, as I said, she, she, she's a bit of a. She comes in here, she meows at me, she, she's a really sort of hoity toity cat and I think it would be great to have a robot, you know, a swarm one robot that can brush her, one robot that can clean her poo, one robot that can brush her, one robot that can clean her poo, one robot that can feed her and just generally make her feel, you know, well, taken care of, and then not not come and bother me while I'm working so that's really good because mine grill I'm, if you're interested, if you're going to ask me the same question oh yeah, what's your robot?
Speaker 3:so mine is pet related too and it's only really just come to me whilst we've been thinking. But, as, as Grillam and anyone who listens to the podcast knows, I have a tortoise and and tortoises are notoriously difficult to hibernate. I know that sounds daft. They're not. Obviously. You chuck them in a box and chuck them somewhere reasonably cold and they just stay there. But but the way that the climate's changing, it's getting more and more difficult because you just can't chuck them down your shed or in an outbuilding, because it will either be too warm and they'll be awake all the time and they'll be burning energy, or so cold that they freeze to death. Uh. So those sorts of days have gone. So we hibernate albert in uh, in a beer fridge, and but you have to monitor them. So every day I have to go and check the temperature. I mean, I've got an internal and external thermostat and you kind of have to go and tickle their feet just to make sure they move, and occasionally you take a look at the head just to make sure that he's still got clear eyes and stuff like that. Yeah, it'd be lovely. So I'd have a little swarm of robots that would probably live in the fridge with him and forever be monitoring his every lack of movement rather than movement and the ecosystem that he's living within, and then report that to me in some way, shape or form, and over time perhaps they would learn enough about hibernation behavior that I would never need to worry again. So I just I just pop him in the fridge and I could shut the door and he's all looked after. So that's what I'd do. Could just get a robot tortoise. I think that's probably a great place to end it. Gullum't it. That's where, where, where, where else to go beyond that and I you know that now I'm now going to start thinking about it, making a robot tortoise. That's I, I, I will have, I will have one by the summer, or at least something that looks like a robot tortoise, even if it doesn't work like like a croc tom.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for coming on. Apologies, it's got a bit daft at times, but that tends to be the way it goes. Um, thank you. Thank you for having me good. Good luck with the year ahead. Uh, it's great having you on super council. It's always good to have the sort of student perspective on council. It sort of keeps council fresh and vibrant and in touch with um where the profession's going, and I think that's a really important feature of only on tech on council. Good thanks, forcil Gwilym. Thanks for appearing on the podcast again with me. I don't know how many we're up to now, but it seems like we've done so many of these that we're starting to get quite good at them.
Speaker 1:I just enjoy wanting to be interested. Just something occasionally, not about IP, is quite fun actually.
Speaker 3:You learn so much, don't you?
Speaker 3:You learn so much every day of the school day yeah um, yeah, if you've listened to the podcast I'm not talking to either of you two now, I'm talking to our listeners. If you've listened to the podcast and you've enjoyed it, uh, leave us a little review somewhere in the internet web thingy so that other people can find us, because, uh, we're keen to grow the listenership and the best way to do that is if you, kind people, tell the rest of the world about who we are, what we do. Um, I'll see you on the next one, tom, I'll see you either at council or I know this dates it but if you're the president's reception tonight, I'll see you there, see you soon Outro Music.