Amir Adibi / Louis Goodman – Transcript

Louis Goodman / Amir Adibi – Transcript

Link to podcast:

https://www.lovethylawyer.com/amir-adibi-acba-patentstrademarksaibusiness/

Louis Goodman 00:04
Welcome to the Alameda County Bar Association and the Love Thy Lawyer podcast. I’m Louis Goodman. Today, we welcome Amir Adibi. Amir’s practice focuses on all aspects of patent and trademark prosecution and counseling. He has expertise in the areas of semiconductors, power electronics, electronic vehicles, computer hardware and computer software, internet, and telecommunications.

Before he was a lawyer, Amir held technical positions on engineering projects for Boeing, General Dynamics, Cisco Systems, and Sun Microsystems. He has been very active in the Alameda County Bar Association and the Earl Warren Inns of Court, and he is fluent in Spanish. Amir Adibi, welcome to the Alameda County Bar Association and the Love Thy Lawyer podcast.

Amir Adibi 01:06
Hi Louis, thanks so much. Thanks for having me on. This is a real privilege and I’m honored to be part of this. Thank you.

Louis Goodman 01:12
I’m so happy you were able to do it. Where are you speaking to us from right now?

Amir Adibi 01:18
So I am right now in Vegas. So I’m outside the CES convention, consumer electronics show. Really, really neat. I haven’t gotten into the show yet. Show starts today. So I’ll be, I’ll be headed in after this.

Louis Goodman 01:31
Now, the fact that you’re outside, that doesn’t indicate that you’ve lost all your money and you can’t rent a hotel room, does it?

Amir Adibi 01:37
Fortunately, no. I’m not a, I’m not a big gambler.

Louis Goodman 01:43
Well, when you’re not hanging out in Vegas, where is your practice located?

Amir Adibi 01:49
So we actually have an office here in Henderson, Nevada. So we have an office in Henderson, which is really convenient because we go to a lot of shows, a lot of shows here at the Las Vegas convention center. A lot of our clients end up coming here. And we also just come here to meet people.

So having an office here is really, really convenient. And then California, we have offices in San Francisco, Pleasanton, and Oakland.

Louis Goodman 02:14
Where are you from originally?

Amir Adibi 02:16
I’m actually from the South Bay. So I grew up in Mountain View pre Google and I went to Mountain View high school. The Google was already a thing by then, but I, my background that was interesting because I’m, I’m half Mexican, half Persian.

So my parents, my mom is from Mexico and my dad’s from Iran. So a very interesting background. It’s a very cultural, very interesting cultural mix. My parents met at Foothill College in, in Los Altos Hills in the language lab, actually.

Louis Goodman 02:45
So is that how you learned to speak fluent Spanish is through your mother?

Amir Adibi 02:50
Through mom. That’s right. That’s right.

Louis Goodman 02:51
Did your dad teach you how to speak Farsi?

Amir Adibi 02:54
No, no. I wish. Unfortunately, when I was growing up, probably not the best advice, but they were advised to stop speaking to me in Farsi because they thought that it would overload the brain and not be good for language development.

So it is what it is. So I’m only fluent in Spanish, but it’s been wonderful and very, very grateful to have that, that skill. And one that I’ve been working on also teaching my daughter.

Louis Goodman 03:18
When you graduated from high school, where did you go to college?

Amir Adibi 03:22
I went down South to one of the Claremont colleges, Harvey Mudd. Claremont Colleges are a special consortium of schools. It’s wonderful. There, there’s five undergraduate schools. Pitzer, Pomona, Scripps is an all-women’s school, and Claremont McKenna College, where my wife Shannon went to, and Harvey Mudd. And Harvey Mudd’s a technical school. The draw of going there was small, liberal arts, but also very, very strenuous and rigorous on the, on the technical, on the mathematics, the sciences, and I really, I really wanted to have that education and it was really privileged that I got to go there.

Louis Goodman 03:57
What drew you to the technical and science world to begin with?

Amir Adibi 04:02
I think really my interest in math, I just, I always really, really enjoyed mathematics. And if you understand mathematics, it makes the other sciences a lot more feasible and easier to understand and study.

And I kind of always knew that I was interested. going to be interested in some sort of intersection between technology and law. And so I knew that I wanted to have that background and needed to have that background.

Louis Goodman 04:27
So when you graduated from Harvey Mudd, you went to law school. Did you take any time off between college and law school or did you just go straight through?

Amir Adibi 04:35
So I actually, I took that year in between to do the LSAT, to study for the LSAT, but I didn’t take the LSAT in undergrad. I just took that year to study, prepare for law school, get into law school, but also to get experience and to meet lawyers. So I worked at a legal clinic in East Palo Alto, community legal services in East Palo Alto.

I worked as a translator during immigration, so I worked on new visa cases, but I spent that whole year just volunteering and I got to meet, of course, I got to know the attorneys that I worked with really well, but I also got to meet a lot of attorneys in the valley, right? Because a lot of large firms have pro bono practices. And so I got to meet attorneys. That we’re an IP and I got to talk and network and get a sense of what they did also. So I think that that’s so, so valuable for our practice especially for young people that are interested in law, just to get some exposure, just to get some sense of what, what is it that we’re doing?

What was it that we do? And is that, is that something that you’d really like? And so, uh, and I know I figured it out pretty quickly that I enjoyed that, that experience, the client experience and being able to get people a voice that wouldn’t otherwise have one. To me, that’s really what law is about. I got to figure out, okay, do I actually, am I actually going to like this?

And then how do I get, get into school? How do I make this happen? And in the summer before starting, I started for the, for the agent exam, the patent agent exam.

Louis Goodman 05:56
So when was it that you first decided, you know, I really want to be a lawyer? And then when did you decide, okay, I’m actually going to fill out the forms and send them the money and make formal application?

Amir Adibi 06:13
Yeah, I think it originated probably from middle school. That’s when I first was, I heard about this thing called a patent and it was like, Oh, this is really cool. This is really interesting because you have to actually understand how this thing works and you get to study how it works and understand it and then on a deeper level than a typical consumer.

And so I think the seed got planted in middle school. And then during my college years, I got to intern at some really neat companies. And so I got. I got exposure to what the engineering life was like. I would say after junior year, summer of undergrad, I did a wonderful internship at Cisco Systems. And just working with engineers, I realized that I didn’t want to do that a hundred percent. I didn’t want to go all in working as an engineer. And so at that point, I think I really realized that was the moment where I was like, Okay, this is a really good, I have a really valuable skill set. This is a really good intersection, being to combine law with technology.

Louis Goodman 07:08
Where did you go to law school?

Amir Adibi 07:10
I went to Santa Clara. I was really convenient. Okay. So I’m from the South Bay. So my parents are still in Mountain View. I had the very special privilege of getting to live at home. So I didn’t have to pay rent and I was able to save. And it’s also just really special. Just being able to spend that time with my parents.

Louis Goodman 07:27
And I would imagine that being right there in Silicon Valley would be really helpful in terms of making contacts both in the legal and in the engineering world.

Amir Adibi 07:39
Absolutely. That’s definitely a hundred percent right. Just getting to meet other engineers, other entrepreneurs, people starting a lot of startups, right? There’s those, especially in that time, there was still a lot of startup. I mean, there still are, but, but there was still just a lot of startups that were getting going. And so it was neat to be so close to that. I made it, I made it all the more worthwhile.

Louis Goodman 07:59
I also find it really interesting that you were drawn to patent law when you were still in junior high.

Amir Adibi 08:08
Yeah, I’m not going to say that I studied it, but I did, I was exposed to it and I realized that, Oh, this is pretty cool. I remember it was one of my classmates planting the seed and I kind of just kind of kept in the back of my mind. And then as I was going through school, I was like, Oh, you know, I really enjoy math. I really enjoy computer science. And so I just, it all just worked out and it was just a kind of just a perfect marriage.

Louis Goodman 08:36
What did your friends and family say when you told them, I want to go to law school, I’m going to be a lawyer?

Amir Adibi 08:43
My parents were jazzed, immigrant parents, right? I mean, they’re, to have their son interested in law and wanting to go into it. I mean, I think it’s a very special thing. You know, one of the things that, that is interesting is that when you grow up with immigrant parents, at least in my experience, my personal experience, their attorney was someone that they held in really high esteem, right? Because it enabled them to get all their documents in order and to actually change citizenship.

Right? So my mom came in on a student visa and so they held their attorney in high regard. Right? And so I remember being very, very young. I think I was maybe four or five, but I have these memories. I don’t know what documents they were preparing or what they were doing, but I remember, I remember going to this attorney’s office in Palo Alto and I started being in his office and I remember playing, he let me play with little toys.

And so I just, I held the profession at a higher regard at a very young age, which is very counterculture, especially now, right? I think a lawyer’s got a lot of hate and it’s a, you know, it’s a tough profession. It’s a hard hustle.

Louis Goodman 09:49
Can you give us a brief history of your legal career? You know, when you graduated from law school, what did you do? And bring us up to date with what you’re doing now.

Amir Adibi 10:03
I took a lot of very interesting detours. But one thing that’s unusual with the agent exam is that you can actually represent people before the patent office without ever having taken a law school course, so you could take the agency exam if you have a technical degree, if you’ve passed the fundamentals of engineering exam, or if you if you show the enough coursework in the sciences, then you can sit for this test. You take the test. It’s a multiple choice test. You take it. If you pass it, you get a registration number. You can go out and represent clients, right?

I never had that in law school. It’s insane. And you can actually, you’re drafting a legal instrument. A patent is a legal instrument that can entitle the holder to damages if there’s infringement. And so I got to do that. And I, so that’s the first thing I did was when I was in law school. I joined this firm at Pleasanton. I started it on there in 09. And I would, I would actually be there for 10 and a half years, which is, uh, kind of unusual, right? Most, most attorneys, especially starting out, don’t usually stay at the same place for that long, but I had, but I had really good mentors. And so I really appreciated the knowledge and they were imparting on me.

And it was a very lean and mean type firm where I got to learn really early on the business of law, which a lot of that isn’t, it’s not taught in law schools and you don’t really learn it, until you’re in it. And sometimes depending on the setting that you’re in, so if you’re in a big firm, you may not get exposed really to the business side of things until much, much later.

But the fact that I got to work at this small firm, especially early on during law school, just really gave me a holistic picture of what law practice would be like. Because from the start, From the start, I had to deal with clients. I had to deal with signing up clients, getting clients engaged, right? Dealing with things like insurance, dealing with things that a normal first year associate probably wouldn’t have to think about in my experience. I got that early on. And so it really gave me really valuable skills, but it also put what I was studying law school in more context. So I was really, really appreciative of that.

And I ended up staying there post-graduation. But before I get into that, I’ll say I had a really interesting detour while I was in law school. I externed at the Public Defender’s Office in Santa Cruz and I got to do, I got a misdemeanor calendar, which was really unusual and I got paid to do it. One of the attorneys went out for attorney to leave.

And so I got to be a certified law clerk, which basically means that as long as there’s another attorney in the Public Defender’s Office. In the courtroom, you can do everything basically what that meant.

Louis Goodman 12:34
What did you think of that experience? What did you think about the Public Defender experience?

Amir Adibi 12:38
It was, it was the coolest detour I ever took and so grateful that I did. I have friends and, um, mentors that I still talk to and the work itself is just so rewarding, so challenging, you know, on, on the selfish side, I got some incredible experience, right? I mean, I got to do trials. jury trials all the way to verdict. I got to argue motions. I got to, I was in court every day. And so the, the experience itself was incredible, but then also just the connections and also just having an understanding and appreciation for our justice system. That was, I think, really important. And it’s something that altered the way that I view myself in society and, and socioeconomic structures.

And it’s something that I read about before, but you don’t really understand it until you’re on that side of the courtroom. So I was just really, really grateful to have that experience. I did that for a year. Afterwards, I went back to basically working full time as a patent prosecutor with Imperium.

And after that, I became partner and I think partner there in 2015, and then I worked there until I left at the end of 2019. Again, I got incredible experience there. I got to do work on a lot of challenging technology and get obtained a lot of interesting patents. I got to work on some patent litigation matters. I got to work on trademark matters. And really I was just, I was just building my business chops.

Louis Goodman 14:07
What prompted you to open up your own firm?

Amir Adibi 14:12
It was about just having full autonomy, just about decision making and about, we need to, to, to make choices without having to, to negotiate with others that might’ve had a different viewpoint, right, on certain things.

And so when you have your own practice, I mean, everything is on you. Everything is on you, but on the flip side, you have full discretion. You have full decision making authority, whatever you want to do, you just do it. But all the consequences, all the mistakes, you have to own them. They fall on you.

You know, the timing was crazy, right? Cause I literally, I left on December 31st of 2019 and I opened shop on January 6th.

Louis Goodman 14:54
And 15 minutes later we were in COVID.

Amir Adibi 14:57
Oh yeah, a lot of people had a very hard time during COVID. I was in this super fortunate space because I was so small that it actually worked in my favor because a lot of clients wanted to move away from large council, right, to reduce their, their burn rate and to reduce their overhead. And so in that sense, I really, I just, I just got lucky, which is. I know the experience is not on a lot of other, a lot of people didn’t have that experience. I mean, people died. I mean, COVID was insane. It changed industries forever. But yeah, I started during that time.

And I think one of the things that I’ll note that was interesting for me just from a firm practice standpoint is that it forced us to get efficient on collaboration online from day one. We find the collaborative aspect and being able to collaborate with others really efficiently, worthwhile. And so that’s one of the technical takeaways that we got out of COVID that was really beneficial for our practice and for how we do business.

Louis Goodman 16:00
In the introduction, I read a string of technologies that you’re involved with. I’m wondering about what your notion is of AI as we go forward into the brave new world.

Amir Adibi 16:15
Embrace it and embrace it as quickly as possible. Look, the key takeaway, I think on, on generative AI. And I mean, everyone’s talking about chat GPT. The key takeaway of it is it’s a tool. It’s a learning tool. Google made information free chat, GPT, and those tools are going to make processing and analysis of that information, if not free, super efficient. And so I think that the quicker you can adopt it in your processes, the better off you’re going to be, I think you should be prompting every day.

And I think that there’s a lot of bad headlines around it because people are a little quick on trying to adopt it in terms of, Task replacement, whereas I think you need to view it as task augmentation. So it’s not write this brief for me. No, it’s, Hey, I have these ideas here. The issues, here’s what I think, what are the flaws, right?

There’s, there’s more creative ways to prompt so that you, as your lawyer, as the practitioner, as the lawyer can craft better arguments, better briefs. It’s not a draft this brief for me, which I think is where people get in a lot of trouble.

Louis Goodman 17:22
Where do you see the patent lawyer’s job in dealing with the technologies that are going to be coming out of artificial intelligence?

Amir Adibi 17:33
Yeah. And that’s significantly impacted our practice already. And actually has been for the last few years, you know, Chat didn’t come out overnight. It’s been, there’s been multiple iterations of it. And so what we’ve, what we’ve seen is that a lot of the technology that we’re working on right now in our practice has an AI element to it.

So the client might be solving a particular problem and then AI somehow gets included or involved in arriving at their certain solution. And so a lot of the applications that we, that we write have an AI piece. And so there’s usually two pieces. So we have to talk about how we train the AI models and then how we use the AI models to make an inference that gets, then gets used in their end application.

So I would say that, I mean, that’s probably the biggest highest level impact it’s going to have on our patent practices that we’re There’s going to be more and more of it, and it’s going to become more and more common and going to be used to solve problems.

Louis Goodman 18:32
You have identified yourself as someone who does patent prosecution, and I’m wondering if there’s such a thing as patent defense.

Amir Adibi 18:42
Oh, absolutely. That’s a great question because it’s very confusing because people hear prosecution and they think, Oh, you must be litigating these patents in court. It’s actually, it’s actually the opposite. So the term prosecution refers to the back and forth with the patent office. So Oh, or trademark examiner, depending on what type of application.

So the United States Patent and Trademark Office is in Alexandria, Virginia. When you file a trademark or when you file a patent application, your case gets assigned to an examiner. And that examiner is a government employee and actually examines your application, trademark or patent.

In terms of patent typically, they’re looking for things like patentability, right? So they’re looking for prior art that might exist and make your, might make your patent not patentable. They’re usually looking for, are there other confusing marks that are too similar? But the point is, is that it’s an ex parte affair.

So you’re doing this back and forth with the examiner. And so that back and forth exchange is referred to as prosecution. So there’s sort of three, generally, people think of three areas of IP. There’s the enforcement piece, which you just asked about. Enforcement slash litigation, the prosecution, which is prosecution or procurement, which is obtaining the rights and then licensing, which is, okay, we have the right. It’s valuable. Someone’s interested. How do we build some mutual relationship where both parties can benefit?

Louis Goodman 20:07
Obviously from what we’ve been talking about, you’re a really bright guy. You’ve got a lot of different experience. You’ve got science background, you got legal background, you know, unlike me and most of the lawyers that I know, you didn’t, you know, major in history and poli sci and then go to law school.

You have a lot of skills that you could take to a lot of different areas, but you’ve chosen to practice law. What is it about practicing law that interests you so much and that has kept you as a lawyer, as opposed to going to some other field that you might very well be qualified for?

Amir Adibi 20:46
That’s an awesome question.

I think that a lot of it has to do with the, just the diversity problems that get thrown our way. So one of the cool things about, particularly doing intellectual property is the diverse array of clientele that we have, right? I have clients that are here at the show. that are doing EV, electric vehicles.

There’s other clients that we have that are doing restaurants, pop ups, mobile food trucks, all kinds of different industries, right? So there’s just a broad spectrum. And so that’s really interesting because it works different parts of your brain, right? We help creative artists. We help non profits. When you are presented with a problem, you really have to put on your business cap and you have to understand what is this client trying to accomplish in the marketplace?

What is this client’s objectives and goals and how can we use IP to help them get there? Sometimes the client will come to you needing a patent, but then what they really, what they really need is an internal process to track the technology that’s being created. Maybe they need help with employment agreements.

Maybe they have a really cool trademark, but they didn’t even think that they needed to trademark. The problems tend to play on many, many different fields. Creativity is what I, where I’m, where I’m going with all this, right? You have to apply creativity. You take all your knowledge and experience, you take all the information that that’s out there, you take their specific problems, and then you get to craft a creative solution that cost effectively gets them what they need IT wise to achieve their business objectives.

And so I think those are the two things that keep it really, really interesting and will keep me wanting to stay in it is that just the diversity of clientele that I get to work with and always learning, always learning something new, something different, and then just challenging, right? It’s hard.

Louis Goodman 22:36
If a young person were coming out of college, would you recommend going to law school as a career choice?

Amir Adibi 22:43
You have to want to be a lawyer. You have to really want to, it can’t be your parents want you, your grandma wants you, it can’t be my dad was, so I need to be. And the one that scares me is I want to be a lawyer because I want to make six figures and with a really comfortable life because well, while that’s possible, you could be miserable. And I think that that’s the piece that sours a lot of people in our profession. So I think, I think that the, the best thing that a young person can do is talk to people that are actually in it, which is why I spend so much time doing mentorship, you know, do externships wherever you can do clerkships, if you can talk to lawyers and just understand what the lifestyle is like, because it’s quite grueling, it’s quite demanding.

It’s, we’re in the service industry where we’re selling our time and time is the most precious thing on this universe because you can never get it back. It’s priceless. Yeah. You have to want to do it.

Louis Goodman 23:44
How has practicing law either met or differed from your expectations about it?

Amir Adibi 23:50
It’s a blend. I mean, I think, I think sometimes I’m just, just from my personal experience, clients sometimes surprise you.

I think. One of the beauties of, of being a lawyer is that we get to benefit from our experience, right? That’s, I’m sure you’ve experienced that as well, right? When you are trying to obtain a new client, one of the things you might say is I’ve been doing this forever, right? Maybe I’m familiar with this court, I know these judges, whatever it is, right? So we have all this experience that we can draw from. But I think that one of the things that is surprising is that that doesn’t always carry over to when you’re trying to assess and read a person. It’s certainly helpful. People can be unpredictable and you make, sometimes you make certain assumptions about potential clients or, or local existing clients, and those turned out to be surprise, a surprise, and you can’t really plan for that, but I guess that goes more towards the business of law side of it.

But that piece, the human element, I think that that, that always, that’s, that always keeps it interesting, full of surprises.

Louis Goodman 24:51
You brought up this notion of the business of practicing law a couple of times already in this conversation. And I think that that’s something really critical to talk about because as lawyers, unless we’re working for the government or a company or a really big firm, we need to be business people.

And I’m wondering how that business has gone for you. And I’d also like you to comment on the importance of a lawyer, regardless of his or her situation, having their own book of business.

Amir Adibi 25:29
Absolutely. I think at its core, I think from the business side, I think you need to understand two core foundational business concepts.

One is CAC, Cost of Customer Acquisition, Cost of Acquisition. So what does it cost them to obtain a customer? And then a term known as LTV, Long Term Value. So what’s the value of that customer? These are the two things that you weigh when you make decisions as to how you spend your non billable time, your free time in terms of doing business development.

For me, my personal experience with these two, with these two terms is I’ve had enormous success with building brand online. And particularly one of the reasons why I have so many offices is because I build up Google reviews at each particular location. And that draws a lot of online traffic to my site.

And frankly, I mean, that’s the recipe. You want to start a firm, get a Google business listing, because that’s still where the attention is. People still use Google to find services, a lot of other things, but they use it to find services and then build your reviews, right? So that’s the painful piece. That’s the work piece.

That’s the, I’m going to do something on a, for a highly discounted rate, because I’m just getting started. I’m not going to make a lot of money. Or might lose money. I want to do a really good job for this one person and, and hope, hope that they’ll write me a five star review. Countless times where you do that and they don’t write you anything, or it goes sideways or whatever, myriad of different things happen.

But you just do this day in, day out. You try to deliver as much value as you can to every new customer. And then slowly over time, the key word there is patience. You build up your reviews and then that drives more and more traffic. I mean, that’s how I, how I built this. There’s really not much more to it.

It’s just a lot of work, a lot of work. It’s about being positive every day, persevering. And then the CAC and LTV piece, you know, if you want to spend on an ad, that’s where you have to make a decision, how you spend your ad spend and what’s it worth. What’s each click worth to you. And depending on the practice that you have you might want to focus on certain areas more than others or certain key terms more than others. So the big thing I’ll say is social is free. TikTok is free. Instagram is free. And there’s a ton of attention on those platforms. And so the big thing though, here is time, right? So, and a lot of people don’t want to put in the time, but if you’re willing to put in the time, the attention’s out there.

It’s just about being good and about trying to teach and try to impart as much helpful information as you can to each client and then repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. After over time, you’ll eventually develop a book.

Louis Goodman 28:16
What do you think is the best advice you’ve ever received? And what advice would you give to a young lawyer just coming out and starting practice?

Amir Adibi 28:25
Best advice is just check your ego at the door. Really. I think just try to stay humble and patient. I think those are the two key things. I think if you can do that, really live that lifestyle. I think you can achieve anything if you’re willing to put in work that’s commensurate with your goals.

Louis Goodman 28:42
We’re going to shift gears here a little bit. What’s your family life like, and how has practicing law affected that? I know your wife’s also an attorney.

Amir Adibi 28:52
I grew up as an immigrant, right? I mean, I was born here, but I always had my parents talking to me nonstop, just blasting about, about the homeland, right? About where they were from and what was happening back there.

And so that’s really helped me persevere and just be really just have appreciation and gratitude. Just every day, every day that I wake up. And my parents are still with me. My wife’s parents are still with us. And my immediate family is still with us. I mean, I got everything. Frankly, you, you lose sometimes you lose, right?

I mean, you lose all the time. It’s part of being a lawyer. You have to stay positive because positivity is what draws people. Positivity is what biases people towards you. And a lot of stuff doesn’t really get me down. That I think really had to do with my parents and how they brought me up. You mentioned my wife.

She’s also an attorney. And so that, that’s been a really cool experience because we understand, we understand the game that makes it so much easier, you know, the late nights, you know, that happens all the time, right? And to have another partner understand it. And really, really understand it because they live it makes it all the easier when you’re having these interactions with your partner, with your spouse.

Louis Goodman 30:07
What about recreational pursuits? Anything that you enjoy doing to kind of get your mind off of the practice of law and the business of practicing law?

Amir Adibi 30:15
Having your own firm is like having a kid. You really, it’s just nonstop. I’m going to, I answer your question honestly. And you know, my, my extracurricular is teaching, teaching law. I teach at USF. I’m an adjunct there. And that’s been really, really rewarding and invaluable because it keeps you sharp on just being able to explain foundational concepts of intellectual property and patents. But it also gives me an avenue to do mentorship because I really, really do care about the profession and the people that go into it.

And so any sort of guidance that I can provide, I take all the opportunities I can to do that. And so that’s been a really, really rewarding extracurricular and grateful for the opportunity to be able to do that.

Louis Goodman 31:02
Speaking of extracurricular, this is the ACBA podcast. So, talk a little bit about your work with ACBA and the extracurricular activity that you’ve done with our organization.

Amir Adibi 31:15
Absolutely. So the IP section is a part of the ACBA that puts on programs related, of course to IP. And so I really enjoyed it because it’s given me an opportunity to, to definitely do cold LinkedIn reach outs to the people or people that I meet that might be interested. I get, I reach out to them and either to join up to be part of our group or as CLE speakers.

And so that’s been really, really neat to be able to use it as a platform to connect with more practitioners and more people, and it makes networking even more fun, in my opinion.

Louis Goodman 31:53
Let’s say that you came into some real money, let’s say three or four billion dollars. What, if anything, would you do differently in your life?

Amir Adibi 32:04
I think the money would just be used to do what I do now, just more efficiently and in a larger scale, I would probably figure out ways to channel funds, into opportunities for students, especially in underrepresented communities to have opportunities to have creative avenues of expression of this core foundational, helping young people, young artists, young creatives, young entrepreneurs have avenues to really develop and build those reps.

Louis Goodman 32:33
Let’s say you had a magic wand. There was one thing in the world, the legal world or otherwise that you could change. What would that be?

Amir Adibi 32:41
Probably just more avenues for communication. I think that that’s the core foundational solution to most of the world’s problems. And I think at the core. It all just is based around communication.

Louis Goodman 32:53
Let’s say somebody gave you 60 seconds on the Super Bowl, one minute Super Bowl ad.

Amir Adibi 33:01
My Super Bowl message would be really simple. Call mom, call dad, if they’re still alive, tell them, thank you. Thank you for giving me life. Thank you for giving you everything that they gave you. If they’re not around, call your loved ones and just say, thank you straight up. That’s it.

Louis Goodman 33:16
Amir, if someone wants to get in touch with you, someone perhaps to have your firm represent them or another attorney who wanted to refer you some business or had some questions about the kind of work that you might be helpful on, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Amir Adibi 33:34
You could Google me. So you could go to just Google type in my name, Amir Adibi, or, you know, Bay Area patent, or you could go to our website, which is adibiip.com. which stands for intellectual property.com, adibiip.com. You could go to our TikTok, which is AdibiIP. Again, A-D-I-B-I-I-P.

Or Instagram got to add group on the Instagram, AdibiIp group. Those are all good ways to get in contact with us.

Louis Goodman 34:09
Amir, is there anything that you’d like to talk about to bring up that we haven’t discussed anything at all that you’d like to say?

Amir Adibi 34:18
I think we hit on everything. I got my gratitude piece, my thank your parents piece. And I think please, please embrace it AI, don’t fear it. It’s already here. Just figure out how you can use it as a tool to make yourself more effective and more efficient. Stay positive. Stay patient.

Louis Goodman 34:37
Amir Adibi, thank you so much for joining us today on the Alameda County Bar Association and the Love Thy Lawyer podcast. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you.

Amir Adibi 34:48
Thank you. Thanks for having me. It was an honor.

Louis Goodman 34:52
That’s it for today’s edition of Love Thy Lawyer in collaboration with the Alameda County Bar Association. Please visit the lovethylawyer.com website where you can find links to all of our episodes. Also, please visit the Alameda County Bar Association Website at ACBAnet.org, where you can find more information about our support of the legal profession, promoting excellence in the legal profession and facilitating equal access to justice.

Thanks to Joel Katz for music, Bryan Matheson for technical support, Paul Robert for social media and Tracy Harvey. I’m Louis Goodman.

Amir Adibi 35:39
It’s not. It’s not very, it’s not very, the solutions aren’t very clean, cut and dry. Was that sort of what you were looking for?

Louis Goodman 35:44
It was perfect, I’m not looking, I’m not looking for anything.