After two years as an electrical engineering major at Rice University in Houston, Texas, Professor Jorge Contreras landed a summer job at AT&T Bell Laboratories, one of the major private U.S. engineering research laboratories. However, instead of working in an engineering lab, Contreras was assigned to the Bell Labs patent department.
“That was the first time I had ever really been exposed to not only intellectual property law, but to law in general. As it turned out, I thought it was very interesting,” he recalls. “I got involved with half a dozen different projects at the laboratory and liked learning about cool new technologies in a variety of areas. The experience got me thinking about IP law as a career.”
When he returned to Rice University, he took a business law course, added a double major in English, and spent the summer after his junior year at Cambridge University in an English program.
“All of those courses convinced me that language and writing—and applying those skills to technology—were something I really enjoyed,” Contreras says. “I applied to law school as a result and ended up attending Harvard Law School, always with the intention of pursuing intellectual property law.”
Interestingly, Harvard only offered one IP course while he was a student: Copyright. Nevertheless, he focused on patents during summer associate jobs and in his graduation paper. Contreras also served as an editor of the newly-formed Harvard Journal of Law and Technology (HJOLT) and published several notes and articles in HJOLT and other journals on patent law, art law and technology policy.
Connecting IP law to the biotech industry
Because of his interest in electrical engineering, Contreras took a job after graduating from law school at a large Boston firm with many clients in the Route 128 area, known for technology development. While at first he was able to focus on software and electronics companies within the firm’s transactional law group, Contreras was then assigned to the biotech industry and a project called the SNP (Single Nucleotide Polymorphism) Consortium.
“The U.S. government and others sponsored the Human Genome Project to sequence the entire human genome, and the pharmaceutical industry wanted to be involved, so they formed a consortium to do research that they would then contribute to the public domain,” he explains. “I was assigned to the project as a corporate associate to help them develop their consortium agreement, board policies, an antitrust compliance program, a patent filing program and contracts with the academic laboratories doing the scientific work. It was a big job, and I learned a lot about genetics and genomics. The work was incredible, and other projects flowed out of it for many years.”
He also made connections through this work, including with Francis Collins, former Human Genome Project and National Institutes of Health (NIH) director.
“Dr. Collins invited me to sit on a number of advisory committees at NIH relating to genomics and genetics. I kept up with this once I became an academic, and it remains an interest of mine. I wrote my book ‘The Genome Defense’ about my research on the civil rights case AMP v. Myriad, in which Myriad Genetics (a spinout from the University of Utah) had patented the BRCA genes that are closely linked to breast and ovarian cancer,” Contreras says. “It’s gratifying to be in academia now, because I have the ability to have a public impact. Thousands of people have read ‘The Genome Defense,’ and knowing that others are using it, thinking about it, carrying it forward, is very rewarding.”
A prequel to “The Genome Defense” is in the works now, detailing the history of Myriad Genetics.
“It’s an interesting look at the way a biotech company could come out of a university, use science and the legal system to develop a new business, and fight for that business over the years until it became very successful,” Contreras says. “Patents are part of that story, but there’s more to it than patents, including litigation, regulation, international law, insurance coverage and bioethics.”
Leading Utah Law’s IP Law program
As director of Utah Law’s Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law, Contreras was excited to launch and oversee the new Intellectual Property Clinic in spring 2026 together with practitioners Sam Noel and Jonathan Love and Experiential Learning Director Jackie Morrison. The clinic was certified by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to prosecute patent and trademark applications for clients. Students also advised 21 teams on patent matters during the annual Bench to Bedside competition sponsored by the Center for Medical Innovation.
“Utah Law is small enough that you can get to know the students, and I’m confident that I know every student who graduates interested in IP law through the Student IP Law Association (SIPLA), the new clinic, and classes I teach. There’s a real difference between a class of 600 versus a class of 100, even in a specialty area like IP,” Contreras explains. “It helps the students, too, because I can supervise directed research projects if they’re interested, and we can talk about career options. The small class size allows everybody the chance to get involved and participate.”
Part of Contreras’s intellectual property research also centers on FRAND (fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory) licensing within the tech industry. Because companies collaboratively develop technology standards like Wi-Fi and 5G, they need to enable all competitors in the market to use the technology on a nondiscriminatory basis.
“No one is going to be excluded from, say, putting Wi-Fi in a laptop, but they have to pay something. The trick is, how much do they pay? What’s fair and reasonable, and how do you figure out what’s discriminatory? It’s an issue worth hundreds of billions of dollars across all these different technologies and has become an international area of dispute because of global markets,” Contreras says. “I’ve been involved in this field for about 30 years, both as a lawyer and as an academic, and have been an expert witness in many of these cases around the world. I’ve also consulted for different governments and IP offices to think about strategies for making the system more efficient and getting back to the kind of cooperative stance that it began with.”
The most challenging part of Contreras’ specialty is keeping up with all the changes in IP law. He edited a reference manual called “FRAND Cases in Context,” published in January 2026, with 26 leading FRAND cases from around the world. That volume contains just a fraction of the disputes.
“We had a book launch event in London for the manual. One of the prominent judges in this area accurately pointed out that as soon as it was published, this book was obsolete,” Contreras recalls. “More cases are coming out every week. I enjoy keeping up with all of this, but on the other hand, it’s daunting. You’re always behind.”
Focusing on generative AI
Contreras is also researching artificial intelligence concerns and will publish an article in the Illinois Law Review later this year about the history of generative AI contract drafting and negotiation (“Solving for Agreement: The Past, Present and Future of Gen-AI Contract Generation, Review and Negotiation“).
“I was a transactional lawyer, so drafting, reviewing, and negotiating contracts was what I did for a living. The way AI tools are being used these days to augment that practice is quite interesting,” he explains. “Next year, I’ll be working with a student on some experiments and empirical work to look at how this is actually working and how good the AI tools are in helping with this work.”
Today’s GenAI tools can generate plausible short contracts and contractual clauses, often reflecting a user’s preferences, but are plagued by inconsistency, irreproducibility, hallucination, hidden bias, the inability to anticipate future events, and a general lack of transparency, Contreras wrote in the abstract of his forthcoming paper.
“The paper analyzes the history and current state of GenAI tools for contract drafting, review and negotiation and offers some predictions about where the market is heading,” he says.
Planning future research and collaboration
Already looking ahead to 2027, Contreras is planning a new book about the legal history of an unexpected topic: meteorites.
“I’ve done a bunch of field research, and the book will combine science, property law, and intellectual property. I’ll leave it at that as a teaser,” he says. “I’m excited to see how everything pans out over the next few months.”