When longtime patent lawyer Allen Lo started out in the business nearly 30 years ago, his work wasn't the most popular topic at the cocktail party.

But that has changed over the years, said Lo, who is now vice president and deputy general counsel and head of intellectual property at Facebook. His comments Friday came during a panel discussion at the Minority In-House Counsel Association's annual conference in Atlanta.

Beginning in the early 1990s with high-profile controversies such as the Blackberry patent dispute, Amazon.com's lawsuit against Barnes & Noble Booksellers Inc. over the one-click purchase patent and, most recently, the smartphone patent wars between Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., the topic of IP has become more mainstream, Lo said. And the development, he added, has affected how he does his job.

“People pay a lot more attention [to IP issues] than before, and we get a lot more questions from [company] engineers, from executives, and that requires us to keep up with what they're reading too,” he said.

The other big evolution in IP, Lo said, is companies' monetization of patents—a move toward “making money off of the very expensive investment we've been making over the past 10 years.”

This trend extends to smaller companies as well, added Neer Gupta, associate GC at Verizon, who noted that these businesses generally highlight their IP portfolio in merger and acquisitions materials.

“IP is at the heart of what companies think about and do every day,” he said. “When we think about where we're going to be in five years, IP is part and parcel of what we're thinking about. These are the core of your company.”

Given this evolution, the role of a company's top IP lawyer has significantly changed as well, said Toni Hickey, deputy GC and chief IP counsel at diesel engine and generator manufacturer Cummins Inc.

“At this point, if you're a chief IP counsel for an organization, you are in every room where strategic decisions are being made,” she said. “The transition that I've noticed is moving from being a strict practitioner to being a business counselor and understanding the strategic goals of the organization.”

Although dubbed the IP and technology panel, Friday's discussion focused largely on other matters, including participants' career paths, best practices for navigating one's career and ways to affect change within an organization. The panelists offered the following insights:

• On taking on new challenges, Ami Patel Shah discussed becoming managing director of the IP finance group at private equity hedge fund Fortress Investment Group after nearly 10 years as an IP lawyer at Intel Corp.: “I knew nothing about the finance world, and I kept saying, 'I'm not qualified.' For us as females and minorities, we sometimes say, 'I've got a good job. I don't want to mess with it,' and it's hard to take those chances. But having a network of mentors and friends can push you to venture into the unknown.”

• On choosing what to do professionally, while still striving to give back to the community, Vanessa Bailey, global director of IP policy at Intel, said: “There are a lot of factors that influence what people want to do, including doing what they enjoy and what they're good at. In life, we have to not let people put certain pressures on us to make certain decisions. No matter what you do, you can still give back. Just consider a holistic approach to life in general and do what's good for you and your faith and your family.”  

• On the importance of being self-aware about goals, from Gupta: “Being self-aware of what you want in life is going to change over time. I learned that, for the things that I want, I need to speak up. I can't assume that everyone knows what I want or that everyone wants the same thing. You have to make it known to other people that that's where you want to be.”

• On improving diversity within a company, from Hickey: “We have a lot of influence in how we retain outside counsel. But it can't be just our job. It has to come from the majority population as well.”