IP boutique Harness, Dickey & Pierce has brought back a familiar face to take a brand new position. Bill Coughlin, who practiced at the firm for 17 years before starting an in-house career in 1995, rejoined the 100-lawyer, Troy, Michigan-based firm last week as its first chief executive officer. He's been tasked with overseeing the firm's short and long-term strategic business planning, client development and firmwide operations.

It's not Coughlin's first CEO gig. As assistant general counsel at Ford Motor Co. he served as CEO of its IP subsidiary, Ford Global Technologies LLC, leading a team of 40 employees in five countries. We caught up with Coughlin, 66, earlier this week to talk about the perspective he brings as a former partner, a client of the firm, an executive and—most recently—an organic farmer.

Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Can you give us a little background about Harness Dickey?

A. The firm was started 99 years ago in downtown Detroit and moved out to the suburbs decades ago [now in Troy]. St. Louis and Reston, Virginia, are big offices for us, as well. We've planted a stake in Dallas and are gonna grow there as well. Could we go beyond that? It's one of the issues I'm looking at: What can we do with what we've got? Where can we go from here, as we approach the second century of the firm?

Q. What's the client base like?

A. We've got a broad spectrum of clients in the United States and Europe and Asia. It started out in automotive. The first client of the firm was Chrysler. But today we represent Samsung, Denso, Ricoh, Siemens, Nokia, Textron, University of Michigan, Michigan State University—two cross-state rivals—La-Z-Boy, Medtronic. So it runs a pretty broad spectrum.

We've got a lot of talent here for trademarks, copyrights, patents in particular. One of my strengths is trade secret law. So, I'm going to be looking at what [more] can we do in that space.

Q. A lot of big law firms have employed CEOs. Is it less common at the midsize level?

A. I think that's true. Lawyers in general don't like to be managed. They certainly don't want to pay for that privilege. So most firms try to get by with a managing partner, an executive committee, a management committee. [Harness Dickey] has had a five-person management committee that's managed the firm for years, and it's worked well. But that being said, these people have huge client responsibilities, and we're at the point where we need to focus more heavily on strategy.

The ground underneath the feet of any law firm today is changing with the rise of cloud-based virtual firms, alternate service providers that try to tell clients, "We can do it with very, very few lawyers." And technology changing toward a not-too-distant future that's going to be AI-based.

Q. You have some unique qualifications for this job. But isn't part of the idea of a CEO that you can get some nonlawyer perspective into the running of the business?

A. Absolutely true. Now, the firm has a terrific COO in Dave Roback, a business-oriented financial wizard. But are we used to looking at the legal practice with a business eye toward profitability of the work we're doing? For example, let's say the firm has a reasonable footprint in food tech. So what would it take to win more business in that area? Do we have the right talent? Do we have the right footprint? What clients can we serve really well that we should approach?

Q. And your previous work at the firm and your relationship as a client probably gives you a level of trust with the partners in the firm?

A. Having that history here certainly helps a lot. And frankly, they know the only reason I'm here is to be of help. Ford gave me a great pension. It gives me a lot of freedom, as you might imagine. I'm happy to tell them exactly what I think [laughs] and, you know, if they don't like it, I'm happy to go back to organic farming.

Q. What kind of organic farming do you do?

A. When you retire from a company like Ford, what do you do? I thought, well, let me create a skill I don't have at all that would keep me very active. So I went back to school, Michigan State University's got an organic farmer training program. I've got a 90-acre estate that was a farm 60 years ago.

And then I went back to Ford Motor Co. and said, "What do you think about the idea of a retired Ford employee helping to keep current Ford employees healthy with organic produce?" They loved the idea, and they started buying what I was growing. It's not bad for one's first year.

Q. When did you develop your managerial skills and this entrepreneurial bent? Was it at the law firm or at Chrysler or Ford?

A. Chrysler sent me to Stanford University, they've got the Stanford Executive Program. For a summer, they try to cram as much of an MBA into your head as they can get. And I'm sitting there with all these nonlawyers, up-and-comers in various businesses, and talking through case studies as business schools do. And I'm thinking to myself, I can do this [laughs]. So it really lit a fire in me, to be honest, to think in a more entrepreneurial sense.

Ford was great for empowering employees. I created the first enterprisewide innovation contest in the company's history and did it with electric bikes. I could see where the market was going. So why wait? What can we do to get people thinking about multimodal transportation at Ford? Engineers and designers across the enterprise really responded.

Q. What kind of technology does a firm like Harness Dickey need?

A. That's one of the key questions, frankly, I need to answer. We have very good technology today with internal security, document management, a portal just for clients [where] they can get instant answers on what they have and where they have it.

But, you know, the world is changing mighty fast. What worries me the most is the artificial intelligence developments. There's an arms race coming where the Patent Office is going to have its set of tools to try to demonstrate that this patent shouldn't be granted, and law firms are going to need their set of tools, going, "Wait a minute, oh yes [it should]." So it's gonna be fun, and I want to make sure that we're really on the edge of that.

Q. There's a conventional wisdom that the auto industry isn't ready for the challenge of licensing all of the IP that enables connected cars. Do you agree with that?

A. That's one of the areas where I tried to build a foundation in the industry while I was there, to get folks ready to be more receptive to licensing. If you look at the autonomous vehicle space, there's going to be thousands of inventions needed to make that work well, safely and so forth. No one company, no one university, whatever, is gonna really be able to do that alone. Companies will need to be receptive to licensing in as well as licensing out.

Ford, when I was there, I thought we did a great job of trying to create an environment that was friendly toward licensing. Everybody wants value. If you're a patent portfolio only, you want value for that. And a lot of times it's easy for the owner to think that it's worth more than it really is. Because ultimately it's not just having great technological solutions. The licensee has to take a lot of risk to implement them, to market it in a way that [will make users comfortable].

In my view, I like to be transparent. Here's how we came to the amount or rate or whatever it is that we'd be asking. And it needs to be reasonable not just to the licensor company; it needs to be seen as reasonable by the licensee. That's a really high standard. And if you can reach that standard, now you've got a real discussion.

Q. How has the culture changed at Harness Dickey in your time away?

A. The good parts of the culture are strong—the collegiality of the attorneys and the staff. You don't survive 100 years and thrive without having a good strong culture. One of my first issues that I want to make sure we're on the right path is diversity. I wrote to the general counsel of Ford and [asked him] to point me in the right direction to what really works. I trust Ford and Bradley Gayton, the general counsel, to give me that insight.

That kind of consideration was not as prominent, you know, 40 years ago. Dial back in time, maybe it was a great work environment for the partners. But I think today managers are looking at every aspect of the business to see what can and should you be doing to make it a great environment for everyone. So we've got a strong, good environment today, and I just want to make that better and make sure we can attract the talent that we need to win.