Jack Chen
Visionary
Jack Chen
All attorneys are certain to face challenges during their first years at a firm. For Baker Botts intellectual property associate Jack Chen, who is blind, those early obstacles are assuredly tougher, but never insurmountable. “Patents have a lot of diagrams and figures, but I haven’t let that stop me. I developed a system for describing patent drawings in a textual format, and can picture the drawings in my mind,” he explains. “For discovery in litigation, I perform Optical Character Recognition [OCR] on the documents, translating an image into text, which allows me to read them with my talking computer.”
Chen’s “never say die” attitude also helped him in the New York and New Jersey bar exams, where he was required to take the multistate exam by listening to the questions from a cassette recorder. “It’s like taking the bar exam using a one-line teleprompter.”
“Baker Botts has been amazing,” continues Chen. “They provide me with the tools that I need to excel. Basically, I work with a scanner and two computers running software that converts anything that shows up on the computer screen to speech. I can work with patents, contracts, cases, briefs, pleadings, and any other documents as well as anyone.”
Since joining Baker Botts’ New York, NY, office in 2007, Chen has established a practice focused chiefly on the computer and high-tech, software, and business method industries. Within the firm’s patent law division, however, his duties span many clients and subjects. Chen manages and prosecutes large dockets of national and international patent applications. He has been involved with a number of licensing and transactional deals, including several multimillion-dollar mergers. Part of the firm’s trial team, Chen also provides litigation support in district court cases.
Chen was born partially sighted. As a child, he could see “just enough,” as Chen puts it, “to get into trouble. I rode a bike without really seeing where I was going, which is sort of dangerous. Like most kids, I liked video games a lot. When I got close to the screen, I could play really well.”
At 16, he lost his eyesight entirely as the result of complications stemming from a cornea operation. “Losing your sight as a teenager in high school is not easy—it was tough socially,” recalls Chen. “In some other ways, I was prepared. Because my vision had grown progressively worse prior to the botched surgery, I was learning how to adjust—reading Braille, for example.”
But some of the attitudes he encountered took him by surprise. “People treated me as if I would be limited. They communicated it as, ‘don’t worry if you’re not too successful; let’s just try and get through this.’ But I didn’t want to just ‘get through;’ I wanted to excel.” Chen’s parents [who had emigrated from Taiwan to the U.S. in 1971] pushed him to excel, too. “Early on, they instilled in me a sense that blindness was no excuse for failure and I had to work for whatever I wanted, and that’s been my perspective ever since.”
Chen took his SATs in Braille. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science at Harvard College and the University of California at Berkeley, respectively. He eventually went on to graduate from Fordham University Law School. For the last three years, he has practiced in firms, proving that he can make his career work despite the challenges presented by his disability.
For several years prior to becoming a lawyer, Chen was a senior system engineer for New York-based Xanboo Inc., where he developed home monitoring systems and created the technology that led to a number of patents. “Their product is top-notch,” he asserts. “It connects cameras and sensors around the house to the Web, and provides an interface for you to interact with them remotely—not necessarily as a replacement for traditional security services, but more so you can keep an eye on things at home when you’re away.”
Chen harbored no thoughts about going to law school when he started at Xanboo in 2000. Growing exposure to the legal side of the business, however, seeded an interest in that direction: “I was hired to do computer work, but I also spent a lot of time with outside counsel putting together a patent portfolio as Xanboo’s director of intellectual property. My interest in intellectual property grew, and I went to law school at night.”
After graduating from law school in 2005, Chen was hired as an associate at Kenyon & Kenyon’s New York office. “The career transition went pretty smoothly,” recalls Chen. “Because I’d been working with outside counsel at my day job and studying law at night, not only did I arrive knowing what to expect, but I also understood how patents could be used as assets, and how to help clients leverage and maximize their patents.”
“Still,” he notes, “litigation is an art that I’ve had to learn, and am still learning. By nature I’m more of a problem-solver; an advocate who is adversarial when I need to be, but very much cooperative. My take on litigation is about providing creative, growth-fostering solutions that benefit everyone involved. And I think such solutions are sometimes more of what corporations are looking for these days, instead of spending many millions of dollars in long, drawn-out, bare-knuckled battles.”
Very few visually disabled people are practicing law today. Those who do are mostly solo practitioners or in the public sector. “Baker Botts is sensitive to disability,” notes Chen. “There is a visually impaired attorney in our Washington office, and as far as I know, I am the only blind patent attorney currently working in any firm in the nation.
“Most employers aren’t sure about how to deal with a blind person—and what exactly he or she can do,” continues Chen. “I compare it to the 1950s and 1960s, when lawyers of color were just beginning their journey and finding a voice in the legal community. People with vision disabilities are now at the very beginning of their journey, and I definitely want to be a part of it. I’d like to be in a position to prime the pump.”
Chen’s professional plan is currently twofold: to continue practicing patent law, and to give back. Lately he has been brainstorming about ways in which visually impaired young people might be introduced to the legal profession through programs similar to those currently in place for racial and ethnic minority high-school and college students. He also has very happily agreed to be listed on an ABA database naming him as an available mentor for lawyers with vision disabilities. “One of my goals is to help the disabled,” concludes Chen. “The majority of folks with disabilities are unemployed, and to me that isn’t right. It shouldn’t be that way. I want to use my skills, and the opportunities I’ve been given, to help others navigate the trials of working in the legal profession.” DB
Patrick Folliard is a freelance writer based in Silver Spring, Md.
From the May/June 2009 issue of Diversity & The Bar®