Influencers in Toronto: Spotlight on Omar Nassif

It's my pleasure to be speaking this afternoon with my friend colleague and partner Omar Nassif, one of Canada's leading patent agents. Hello Omar, thanks for doing this.

Hey Kevin, good to be here.

Can you summarize in a nutshell your long and successful career and how you got into this field?

Sure I graduated from U of T in the mid-80s as a young chemist who didn't want to work in a lab and found myself ultimately working as a patent agent trainee in Sarnia in industry, had a brief stint there and then joined McCarthy & McCarthy, as it was then called in 1988, passed the qualifying exams that year and started my career. I became an equity partner at that firm before I was age 32 and I joined Gowling's in 1997.

And over the course of the decades, what's been the biggest change you've seen in your career?

You know I would say it's the speed of communication. When I first started work there were no cell phones, there were no laptop computers, if you fast forward from that baseline to now you'll understand all of the advances in technology which have allowed us to be efficient but also have invited clients to be more demanding in terms of when they want things and having access to people around the clock.

Can you tell us some of the best advice you've received over the years? 

The most important advice I received early on in my career was that clients will hire you based on your experience. Our industry is full of very competent people, everybody's competent that you're not going to really distinguish yourself on that basis. I think where people can distinguish themselves is at their experience level. I had the privilege of working with two of Canada's most senior and respected patent litigators Gary O'Neill and Neil Belmore and from them I learned so many things about how patent litigators review and strategize patent cases, how they review the work, I did what happens when you give a patent litigation team an unfettered budget to defend or try and take down a patent, what that does is it makes you a better patent drafter it makes you careful with everything you say and it makes you build into the document that you're drafting all kinds of measures that will hopefully help defend it if it ever gets litigated.

And how would you describe your approach to working with clients to protect their inventions?

I'd say the approach really is founded in communicating with clients at their level what that means is working with inventors and telling a story of the invention made by the inventor through the inventor's eyes and recognizing that the ultimate audience of what we write together is going to be a judge or a jury. And how would you describe your approach to training juniors? My approach to training juniors is based on constantly challenging them to do more to take on more responsibility but not putting them in situations where they cannot succeed.

What would you say is the big news in the world of patent filings these days? 

Oh to me it's by far artificial intelligence uh like a tidal wave of uh patent filings based on artificial intelligence which is now basically everywhere. It's in patent search engines, it's in drug design, it's in the automotive industry most industrial processes robotics it's led to a large number of patent filings in that subject matter area where there weren't any say five years ago or very few. So it's exponential growth in terms of patent filings and ultimately in five to ten years I think it will lead to exponential growth in patent litigation as those patent filings make their way through the system.

Thanks for speaking with me this afternoon.

Good to be here Kevin