With an IP career, Sai is bringing art and law together

Finding his legal niche 

Early on, Sai signed up for the Wotton Kearney Neota Law Tech Challenge, an extracurricular competition in which student teams build no-code legal software solutions for non-government organisations. Part of the challenge involves navigating app and data ownership, implementation and copyright issues; these experiences became Sai’s first introduction to the world of intellectual property (IP).  

Intrigued, he started enrolling in IP-focused electives in areas like trade marks, copyright and designs, and patents. When he discovered the overlap between the law and his second love, art, he was hooked. 

With support from the University’s leading IP academics, who also lead the highly regarded postgraduate Intellectual Property and Trade Marks and Practice programs, he started building his expertise in this niche area of the law. 

“UTS has one of the premier IP law teams and some of the leading Australian and international academics in that space,” he says.

“They were incredibly helpful in guiding me through the fundamentals of IP Law.”

From Australia to the world 

Sai’s burgeoning interest in all things IP soon became his ticket to a truly global degree. UTS prides itself on providing a wealth of international experiences for students, and Sai took advantage of everything the University, and the Faculty of Law, had to offer.  

He signed up for the Law Mooting Program, which invites students to participate in mock trial competitions in Australia and beyond, and reached the grand finals of an intervarsity moot focused on legal technologies. Later, he competed in the prestigious Philip C Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition in Washington DC. 

He also took part in mediation competitions run by the International Chamber of Commerce, travelling to Hong Kong and Paris to build his negotiation capabilities. The competitions featured copyright disputes and a patent infringement involving the modification of a Big Pharma-developed product by a humanitarian-sector NGO. 

In his fourth year of study, Sai travelled to Indonesia on a prestigious New Colombo Plan Scholarship, funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. For six months, he studied IP issues at the top-ranking Universitas Indonesia. He also started building global connections in earnest, visiting one Indonesia’s top IP firms and completing IP short courses in Germany and China. 

Next stop: a postgraduate IP degree 

Now a recent graduate, Sai is currently working as a paralegal for Gilbert + Tobin and for the Attorney General’s Department. He’ll start a graduate role in commercial litigation next year. But while he’s still in the early stages of a law career, his aspirations are already leaps and bounds ahead.

“My hope is to work in litigation for a few years and then branch into IP litigation,” he says.

To that end, he’s also committed to taking the next big step: pursuing a postgraduate IP degree. Combined with the professional experience he’s building now, postgraduate study will prepare him to fully embrace the opportunities ahead.

 “It’s not a consideration; it’s 100 per cent happening,” he says.  

“I’m positive it will create more opportunities for my career.”