Career series: Lisa Larrimore Ouellette

Tell us about the course of your career.

I thought I wanted to be a research physicist, but in the final year of my PhD at Cornell University, I realised that the research questions I had focused on weren’t the kind of problems I wanted to study for the rest of my career.

I had always been interested in bigger-picture questions of science policy, and I read an article about patent law that inspired me to go to law school. My first exposure to legal scholarship and research came during a seminar in my first year at Yale Law School, and I loved it.

Afterwards, I clerked on the Federal Circuit and Second Circuit, did a post-doctorate at Yale Law School, and started teaching at Stanford Law School in 2014.

Outline a typical day in your role.

There’s no “typical day” but the work of a law professor can generally be divided into teaching, scholarship, and service. I teach classes related to IP and innovation law, and the time I spend teaching includes many hours of preparation for each hour in the classroom, even for classes I’ve taught before.

I’m convinced by pedagogical research on the value of active learning for helping students recognise misconceptions and practise essential skills. So my classes are full of interactive activities such as multiple-choice polls or roleplay.

I’ve also been spending my sabbatical writing a free patent law casebook that will be published online this summer—which has been a rewarding project.

My legal scholarship has focused on improving our theoretical and empirical understanding of IP and innovation policy. For example, I surveyed scientists to learn how they use information in patents, and I conducted a three-year field experiment to see whether expert peer reviews could improve patent examination.

I also showed that the conventional wisdom that giving university inventors a higher share of patent royalties increases licensing income was due to coding errors. Lately, I’ve been interested in the impact of innovation laws on health issues, including the opioid crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of this research is conducted with wonderful co-authors—I find collaborative work more fun and intellectually fruitful.