Tiffany Lee

Tiffany Lee embarked on her legal journey in 2004, starting as an M&A and general corporate attorney, but her career took a pivotal turn in 2007 when she joined the team representing the Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Lee said the team needed an associate who could read and write Chinese to help with drafting and reviewing agreements for the Beijing Olympics.

"I found this first foray into IP work and jurisdictional IP law so exciting that after the assignment, despite already being a fourth-year associate who had never taken an IP class in law school, I transferred into the technology transactions practice group," she said.

Today, Lee serves as managing partner of Willkie's first West coast office in Palo Alto, which she helped launch in December 2018 and handles matters involving innovative technologies in a wide variety of industries, ranging from more traditional electronics, semiconductor and biopharmaceutical industries to quantum computing and artificial intelligence for clients.

"Concomitant with recent global semiconductor supply constraints, there has been a growing need for more advanced and complex infrastructures to keep pace with evolving technology - therefore, over the last few years, some of my most significant matters have been in infrastructure transactions," she said.

She has represented Meta since 2010, which includes the establishment of their Open Compute Project. This initiative aimed to open-source hardware designs for energy-efficient and cost-effective data centers.

In addition, Lee's work has expanded to include drafting and negotiating agreements for semiconductor intellectual property and AI-related transactions.

Over the last few years, she has also represented QuEra in agreements with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to launch Aquila, QuEra's first generation of neutral-atom quantum processing units on Amazon Bracket, thereby enabling AWS customers to develop quantum applications and encode problems in hardware-efficient ways.

"These and other matters help build the foundations on which to further advance technology beyond our imaginations," Lee said.

She said many of the transactions she has assisted clients with in the last few years have been AI related, "where many IP issues, including how IP ownership will be allocated for both input into AI models and output AI generated content, are still unclear."

Lee said licensees want to be able to use AI tools to perform more efficiently in the workplace while avoiding potentially infringing third-party IP from "regurgitation" and inaccurate or misleading information caused by AI hallucinations.

"Therefore, advising clients on these transactions requires finding a 'delicate' balance through creative thinking," Lee said.