Paven Malhotra is leading some of the most closely watched AI disputes in the country, representing OpenAI and other technology companies while the courts work out the law in real time. We trace his path from a teenage telemarketer cold-calling for a roofing company to a lawyer who has now worked through three waves of technology litigation: smartphones, social media, and AI. We also talk about an early bet on 3D printing that never turned into the practice he expected, and what that taught him about building a career at the edge of an industry before anyone knows how it will settle.
Top Insights
- Paven's business development instincts started as a teenager, cold-calling homeowners for a roofing and siding company. The neighborhood-organized phone books he worked from taught him how accumulated local knowledge could raise a pitch's success rate over time.
- He has worked through three consecutive waves of technology litigation: smartphone patent disputes, social media content and CDA 230 cases, and now AI copyright litigation for frontier model companies.
- The myth he corrects most often: people assume an AI model works like a database you can pull original works out of. He argues the models are built to generate new content, not store retrievable copies.
- Litigation tends to lag the technology it disputes. Private lawsuits come first, government and regulatory action follows, and the body of case law grows from there.
- His early, deliberate bet on 3D printing as a coming wave of IP disputes, in the early 2010s, never turned into real litigation work. Not every bet on a frontier technology pays off.
- He leans on positive psychology, especially the idea of creating your own meaning, to stay grounded through years-long cases where the client's business, leadership, and even the product can change before the case reaches trial.
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Full Transcript
Khurram Naik: All right, Paven, I have been looking for this interview for some time. We met a number of years ago and I've been following your career since then. You're running some headline-making cases for OpenAI, among other litigation. That's plenty interesting, but I'm really interested in how you got here in the process, and I'm excited to explore that with you.
Paven Malhotra: Sure. Well, Khurram, it's great to finally sit down and talk to you. I've been following your podcast for a while, and a lot of the people I admire, including a number of my friends, have been interviewed by you. So it's a real pleasure to be here with you today. So, how did I get into law? It was a bit of a circuitous path. I grew up in Minnesota, and there's a very strong speech and debate community in high schools there. I was one of those speech and debate nerds, and I caught that bug pretty early. My original intention was actually to take that interest in speaking and go into broadcast journalism. When I was in college, I was super interested in being a TV reporter. The summer after my freshman year of college, I was in DC working on Capitol Hill, but I had that bug, that interest in broadcast journalism. So I just made a cold call to the DC bureau for NBC News. I don't know how I got the phone number, I think I somehow found it for the bureau, and I just called. I happened to speak to one of the heads of the bureau at the time, his name was Brady Daniels. I introduced myself and said, I'm a college kid, I'm super interested in this, and I'm willing to do whatever you need help with, whatever it is. He said, okay, why don't you come in. So I came in on a weeknight after I had worked my day job on Capitol Hill, and it was kind of a surreal experience, because I came to the bureau wearing a suit, coming from my day job. Brady met me in the lobby and then proceeded to take me to his car in the parking lot. I was unsure what was happening, but he took me to his car, then opened the hood and asked me to look at what was wrong and fix it. I was thinking at the time, this is some kind of test he's putting me through to see how I react to challenging circumstances. But it turned out he was actually expecting a mechanic to come look at his car, and he just took me for the mechanic. It was a funny experience when we quickly realized I had no mechanical knowledge, but I did have this interest in broadcast journalism. We got a good laugh over it, and he ended up hiring me. So I worked weeknights and weekends at the NBC bureau, helping with whatever reporters needed, whatever cameramen needed, going out on stories. It was a fantastic experience. I think that was one of my first experiences with cold outreach. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it leads to funny experiences. But it taught me early on the importance of taking risks and trying things. I ended up working at the NBC bureau, and the ABC bureau the next summer, and had a wonderful experience. Ironically, though, almost everybody I worked with told me not to go into this field. They said it was gratifying in many ways, but also very challenging, and some of the market dynamics for TV news were changing. So after hearing all of that, I thought, I'm still very interested in storytelling, in communication. How can I use those interests in a different way? Law school and litigation seemed like the right fit. At the end of that experience, I pivoted and ended up going to law school.
Khurram Naik: What's the legacy of that experience? I think a number of lawyers come to the practice after having studied journalism in college, or having been journalists themselves for a period before law school. What, for you, is the legacy of that experience?
Paven Malhotra: I think there are two things. One is the need to work under tight deadlines. The second is figuring out how to distill a complicated concept into its core components and deliver it to a lay audience. When you're working in journalism, those are things you have to do day in and day out, because every day you're producing a new story, and oftentimes under very tight deadlines. I think those two skills translate into litigation as well, where you need to convey your client's case not only to a judge who often has no familiarity with the specific facts, but frankly also to the business folks at your client, who may not understand the legal dimension of the case. You're having to distill the key issues to different audiences, on tight deadlines, day in and day out. So those two elements of my experience in journalism have really translated to the legal world.
Khurram Naik: You mentioned having multiple stakeholders you're speaking to as well. I can't say I'm an expert in media, but it strikes me that a given platform has different messages for different audiences, communicated through different channels. So what are the biggest differences between communicating in a legal context versus a journalism context?
Paven Malhotra: Yeah, I think the biggest difference is that you have an adversary in the law. In litigation, there's an adversary challenging everything you're saying, everything you're doing, whose job for the most part is to try to challenge and attack you. That's not something you have in journalism. There isn't a natural adversary you're working against. I think that's the biggest difference, and frankly one of the biggest stressors too. Like sports, the law is an adversarial process where someone is always trying to challenge what you're doing, what you're saying, the outcome you're trying to achieve. So you have to stay on your toes. It forces you to be sharp, but it's also another dimension of what makes the job stressful.
Khurram Naik: Your practice involves a number of IP disputes now, quite a wide variety. In the past you had more of a focus on patent litigation, but you've had other litigation experience too. How did you come to these kinds of very technical disputes?
Paven Malhotra: Sure. Well, I've always been super interested in technology and the intersection of law and technology, and that was actually one of the reasons I decided to move to the Bay Area. I started my career in Washington. I was a lawyer at Williams and Connolly out in DC, and it was a wonderful firm, but it didn't have as large a tech-focused practice, particularly in litigation. So after a couple of years there, I decided to move to the Bay Area, in part because I wanted to be in a place where I could have more exposure to tech companies and to legal issues as they interact with technology. Obviously one area of overlap for those two spaces is intellectual property. So it was a conscious choice on my part to make the move, so I could position myself in a place where there are tech clients who need the assistance of tech-focused lawyers.
Khurram Naik: You were already at a firm that was very good at what it did, and people came to them specifically for that. Why not lean into what the firm was already good at? Why did you want to venture out and find something you were more interested in, that you saw as promising?
Paven Malhotra: Well, I think when I was at Williams and Connolly, I was a young lawyer, and when you're starting out your career, to some extent you're limited by the kinds of cases the firm is bringing in. Williams and Connolly is an amazing firm, but at that time they didn't have the breadth of tech clients you would see with firms based on the West Coast, particularly in the Bay Area. So part of the reason for me to make that move was to get exposure to a more diverse, tech-focused client base.
Khurram Naik: When I look at your history of litigation, it feels like you've been on some of the biggest waves in IP. You've been part of key smartphone disputes, social media disputes. Walk me through these different waves you've gone through, and what you learned from the ups and downs of them.
Paven Malhotra: Sure. I think what's made my experience as a litigator so interesting over the last 20 years is that each major wave of technology development has resulted in legal issues and litigation I've been able to get involved with. Looking back, I think of the biggest tech innovations in the last 20 or so years as the rise of the smartphone, the rise of social media, and now the rise of AI. Each of those developments are ones where I've been able to play some role and deal with litigation in some facets. With the rise of smartphones, when they first developed, there was a ton of patent litigation between different tech companies, and I was representing some of the Android handset manufacturers in patent disputes brought by Apple. We had ITC and district court litigation involving that, and it was super interesting because the stakes were very high, with companies trying to assert their patents and either seek damages or limit the kind of functionality available on smartphones. Eventually a bunch of those litigations ended up in settlements, so the parties worked out their disputes. But it was very interesting at the time because this was a relatively new platform for computing, and I was able to get involved from the perspective of IP issues. I think the next wave was the rise of social media. There I was also able to get involved, and one interesting thing is that traditionally my practice had been primarily focused on IP issues, and I did do a bunch of IP work for social media platforms, but I was also able to deal with a lot of content litigation. For some of the large tech platforms there were waves of litigation involving content on their platforms, and who would be responsible for that content when third parties put content up and some other party claims injury from it. That litigation was closely intertwined with issues surrounding the Communications Decency Act, or CDA 230. I was able to play a leading role helping litigate those issues around content, social media, and tech platforms, and who would be responsible for the content on those platforms. That was the second wave of tech development and litigation I got involved with. And of course now the big issue transforming society, the big technological change, is AI. I've been fortunate enough to work with some amazing clients on very interesting issues surrounding AI, particularly IP issues concerning AI.
Khurram Naik: How separable are these, really? I'm curious how dependent they are on each other. There's the technological innovation, and then there's the legal change that follows, but some of these questions recur over time, and you end up drawing analogies to previous eras. With AI, people ask how much this is like Napster, or whatever the earlier technology parallel is. You can point to a trend at the Supreme Court too. In patent disputes, there's a consistent line that patent law isn't special, that you get particular rules around injunctions and other aspects. And this past term there were decisions touching on the overlap between copyright doctrine and patent doctrine. So how do you think about the relationship between technological change, analogies to earlier technologies, and how the doctrine evolves? Do you see those as existing in parallel, or intersecting?
Paven Malhotra: Yeah, I think what you often see is that the litigation usually lags the technological change. You'll first have the development of new technologies, companies developing around that, startups, investment dollars going into those spaces. Then oftentimes the litigation comes in waves. You'll initially have smaller-scale litigation filed by private litigants, and then you'll often see federal or state government litigation follow. As the wave of litigation rises, first with private parties, then governmental, then regulatory, the legal doctrine often changes in the process, because there's more case law, more facts, more developments. So you'll begin with a set of case law where courts are looking at analogous technological issues or analogous legal decisions, but as the volume of case law grows, you end up getting new case law focused on the specific issue. A good example is the wave of litigation around CDA 230. A lot of the initial litigation was focused on private disputes between individual litigants and various technology platforms, and the case law was relatively sparse. But in the last five to ten years the amount of case law in that space has exploded. You began to see mass arbitration, mass class actions, state government enforcement. As the volume of litigation grew, the case law grew, and I think you've also seen some judges more willing to take more aggressive positions with the law in that area. That's kind of been my observation about the development of technology and the development of legal frameworks around it.
Khurram Naik: So with AI directly, we're in the early stage here, but you've seen enough cycles to know how this plays out. How do you litigate cases in the early stages? What principles, techniques, or criteria do you use at this stage that you wouldn't use later?
Paven Malhotra: Well, I think there are two issues for anybody litigating early-stage tech cases. One is looking at what the existing case law tells you, and whatever lessons you can draw from it. The second is making very clear to the court the potential implications of their decision, and the importance of keeping those implications in mind, because the pace of technological change is very fast. It's often difficult for a court to understand how things will play out in the future, and for that reason there needs to be, at least in my mind, some conservatism in the breadth and scope of pronouncements made in these cases, because they can have dramatic implications for how technology develops going forward. So for early-stage cases you have to keep those two things in mind: what does the existing case law tell us, and how can we develop the case law in a way that protects people's rights but also allows for innovation and progress in the future?
Khurram Naik: I'm definitely interested in the strategies you use for making analogies, since there's a lot of creativity involved. This reminds me of something that's come up before: the Warhol decision on fair use. There seemed to be a consensus view on how to interpret it, but in the course of working on AI litigation, the decision got revisited maybe a hundred times, and in that process someone extracted an insight that was different from the consensus, and used it effectively. I'd love to talk about that, but I think what's really interesting is this policy point you're making, because case law is something judges are very comfortable referring to. They might agree with how you're distinguishing it, or they might not. But this policy dimension seems a lot more contestable. What do you think a judge's reaction is: "Why should I care how this technology works? I look at cases, I look at precedent, that's what I'm working with. I'm not in a position to shape technology outcomes as a judge, I'm just here to decide the cases in front of me that are actually justiciable." So how do you position those arguments?
Paven Malhotra: I think most judges, rightfully, tend to be cautious deciding cases on the edge of the technology frontier. As lawyers, I think it's important to remind judges of the need for that caution, but it's also important to remind them that while they're obviously focused on the specific facts and the record in front of them, and to some extent limited by that, they also need to keep the broader perspective in mind, and the implications of the kind of decisions they could be issuing. It requires a balance of those two things, and that's true both on the plaintiff side and the defense side in any case. That's something we do as advocates, and it's important, again, not just to protect rights holders, but to make sure we're not foreclosing the ability to have technological progress through decisions that sweep too broadly.
Khurram Naik: Can we go back to the earlier point? When you're in the early stages, looking to make analogies in ways you believe will put judges at ease and guide them, what have you developed over these several cycles of innovation? Are there patterns to how you approach this question, and do you think there are things you do differently than your peers who are litigating these kinds of disputes?
Paven Malhotra: I think it really depends on the case. I don't know that there's one formula you can use in all these cases, because each case is relatively different. But I think one overarching theme is the importance of developing the law in a way that doesn't stifle progress. That's been a pretty important theme for how I've approached cases and tried to position them. In patent cases, if you're on the defendant side, there's an issue of whether asserting a particular patent will stifle the ability of companies to develop new technologies for tech platforms. In content cases, there's a question of whether imposing liability for what third parties say will stifle the ability of platforms to serve as forums for open dialogue. In AI cases, there's a question of whether applying copyright law will stifle the ability of frontier companies to actually train models in a way that lets them generate new output. In all of these cases there's a question of how we're approaching the law and applying it to the facts in a way that enables technological progress.
Khurram Naik: We've talked about what's difficult about managing this for the judge, or what you have to keep in mind on that side. But it strikes me that when you have a client that's changing and growing so fast, that brings its own complications. Just thinking about discovery alone, there are new categories of discovery available now, new questions about how to think about these algorithms and the data behind them. So tactically that's hard. But more generally, the client itself is changing so much over time. I can't pretend to be an expert on AI, but you've got an ecosystem here with companies like Apple and OpenAI that have overlapping, competing interests, maybe an AI company developing a device. There's so much changing with your clients, and I imagine that affects the legal positions you take for them. So part of the hard thing is trying to prospectively estimate what positions stay consistent with the client's goals, when those goals keep changing and you're getting iterative feedback. Walk me through that. That sounds hard.
Paven Malhotra: Yeah, it is, it's absolutely hard. I think one of the challenges is that most litigation now, if it's not resolved on an early dispositive motion, can last anywhere between two to five years, and in the tech world that's an eternity. It's challenging because the business models are changing, the product focus is changing, the personnel is changing. Honestly, the set of personnel and witnesses you anticipate will be relevant at the start of a case could completely change by the time you're at trial, and the org chart could look completely different. That's just the nature of the industry. I think one thing that's challenging for lawyers is that, as the lawyer defending a company, we're often so focused on winning the specific case, thinking about everything we can do to win the specific legal issues, that those particular legal issues don't necessarily align with the broader business and strategy a company is engaged in, particularly if they're in multiple litigations at the same time. So one of the most important things I've tried to do with my clients is to have a very good understanding of where their business is, what their priorities are, and what their product roadmap looks like, because just focusing on the specific legal issue I'm dealing with, or want to advance to win the specific case, doesn't necessarily translate to the company's larger business goals. You always have to have that continual dialogue and understanding of where the business is headed, because ultimately the legal issues, while they may be my world, aren't necessarily the dominant world the company operates in. The company needs to be focused on its business. The legal issues are one component of that, but not the main one. Ultimately there's a larger business that has to be run with that in mind.
Khurram Naik: What strategy have you found effective for getting the business bought into tracking the litigation, so they're not overlooking the significance of what it means for their business? Because if they only focus on the litigation, that's a problem, but if they ignore it entirely, there could be a development in the case that has a massive impact on the business that they could have foreseen.
Paven Malhotra: Yeah, I think it really involves open dialogue between the business, the legal team, and outside counsel. With some clients, they have a very large, sophisticated legal team that's able to interact with outside counsel, but for some of my other clients the legal team might be one or two people, or they might not have a legal team at all, it might just be me working with the business folks. But the important thing is trying to maintain that dialogue, keep an understanding of how the business is operating, and keep the client informed about how the decisions we make in litigation could potentially impact the kinds of strategy they're trying to develop to grow the business more generally.
Khurram Naik: What are the things you do to show that you really understand the business, or to proactively push insights your clients can be thinking about in this space?
Paven Malhotra: Yeah, I think a lot of it just involves trying to stay up to date, trying to stay educated about the broader business space. For me that means following a lot of business press, specialized newsletters, specialized information sources that track particular industries, going to conferences, and frankly just talking to people, whether they work in the industry or are business people at the client. It's a multi-pronged approach to stay abreast of what's happening more generally.
Khurram Naik: What are the kinds of things you've learned from individual conversations? I have some sense of what you might learn from a technical specialist source, but what kinds of insights have you generated from conversations with people in the industry?
Paven Malhotra: I think what's often interesting are the different conversations you have with the legal folks in-house, and, if you get access to them, the business folks at the company. For me it's been particularly interesting when I work with smaller clients who don't have a legal team, and it's just me interacting with the CEO, hearing the dynamics, the challenges, the management concerns they face day to day, and how they position themselves within a particular industry. Another thing that's often interesting is how sometimes the entity you think is the adversary for your company could also be a potential acquirer. Those kinds of insights you sometimes only get by talking with business people. Getting that on-the-ground knowledge of what the competitive landscape looks like for a company, and what their long-term strategy might be, is super helpful, because it can drive and affect the kind of legal strategies you pursue and the approach you take with your case. Working directly with some of those business people is particularly gratifying, because of the insights you don't get when you speak only with the legal teams.
Khurram Naik: We talked a bit about what's honestly hard about working with some of these really large companies. I'm interested in what's surprisingly easy about working with those big companies, and then, with these smaller startups, what's surprisingly easy about those?
Paven Malhotra: Yeah, so with larger companies, the thing that's easier is when they have infrastructure already in place for managing litigation, either because they have a legal operations team, or sophisticated in-house counsel, or they've done this same kind of litigation before. In those instances there are a lot of efficiencies we gain, and we can lean on the in-house team to help manage various streams of the litigation. You don't have that when you're working with a smaller company. There, you have to basically be their outside counsel and, in some sense, their in-house counsel too, helping them gather information and put in place the nuts and bolts of what they need to actually manage the lawsuit. Those are things you don't have to deal with as much when you're working with a larger company.
Khurram Naik: I'm interested in shifting gears to the content of these cases, the AI copyright disputes. What makes these cases doctrinally hard, as opposed to just fact-intensive, or having broader societal or political significance?
Paven Malhotra: Sure. I think that with most traditional copyright cases, the copying is the whole point. For example, a local newspaper publishes a copyrighted photograph they never got permission to use, the copying isn't an intermediate step to something else, it's literally just showing the image to the end user. The AI cases are different, because what they involve is the ingestion of vast volumes of information, and the purpose of that is to better understand how language works, what the world looks like, basic facts, that sort of thing. The purpose of gathering and copying information is to learn from those underlying materials, which can then be used for a new purpose. That dimension of what the copying entails is different from the traditional cases, and I think that's what makes these cases a little more doctrinally interesting, on top of all the other complexity involved with the facts of the case, how the technology works, and the policy and political dimensions.
Khurram Naik: Apart from that difference in how copyrighted material is being used in these disputes, what is the most misunderstood aspect of these cases? These are cases getting plenty of media coverage, interest from lawyers, interest from lay people. What do you feel is the most misunderstood part?
Paven Malhotra: I think the most misunderstood aspect is the belief some people have that AI models are some kind of database you can extract the training material from. A lot of people seem to think an AI model is like a library where you can go check out somebody's book, or somebody's news article, or somebody's video, or somebody's image. That's not what these models are designed for. They're designed for generating new content, and I think that's a point a lot of people just don't appreciate. It's fundamentally important, because if you want a book, if you want a news article, if you want an image or a video, there are far cheaper ways to get that than going to an AI model. Investors, employees, companies wouldn't be spending billions and billions of dollars developing technology that serves a purpose already served by something much easier. If you want an image, you can do a Google search for it. If you want a book, you can buy it from whatever bookstore you want. If you want a news article, you can go to a journalist's website. That's not why people are trying to develop this technology, and it's not why the resources, time, and effort to build it are being spent. It's being spent to generate technology that can create new content.
Khurram Naik: We've talked a bit about where you are today with these AI copyright disputes, and I think what's at least as interesting is how you got here. I'd like to start with some earlier experiences for you. I'd like to hear about your telemarketing days.
Paven Malhotra: Sure, yeah. I come from a family of entrepreneurs, and I had the bug to try to do something in business pretty early on. One of my first jobs was as a telemarketer. I did this when I was pretty young, actually. I worked for a company that had a factory building windows, roofing, and siding in suburban Minneapolis, and I was on their sales team. I was literally cold calling people to try to set up consultations, where our factory reps could go out to people's homes and look at their roofing, siding, or windows, and try to make sales. It was a fascinating experience. We were given these phone books that weren't organized alphabetically like a traditional phone book, but were specialized, organized by neighborhood. Each day I'd have my list of residences to call, and I'd just cold call, eight hours straight. It was a very challenging job. Not surprisingly, people don't want to talk to telemarketers, you get hung up on again and again. But for me it was a pretty formative experience, because it got me used to cold calling others, used to rejection, and it taught me a lot about what I could do to land an appointment. Because these books were organized by neighborhood, as I called more and more people on a list, I learned more and more about that neighborhood: the general age of the homes, the kinds of materials used, the weather conditions they'd recently experienced. As I called more people in a given neighborhood, I had more information, so by the time I was in the last quarter of the people I was calling, my return rate was much higher, because I could customize the presentation and the questions I asked people. It was a very hard job, but it was a great job in that sense, because it taught me a lot about cold calling, rejection, and learning to customize the presentation and techniques you use.
Khurram Naik: Eight hours of cold calling sounds crazy.
Paven Malhotra: It was crazy, it was a very hard job. At the end of that, I think I did that the summer before I started high school, or right after. By the end of that summer I said, I've got to focus on academics, because I don't think I'm built for this long term. But it was a very useful experience in that sense.
Khurram Naik: Yeah, when I was 21 I worked on a national political campaign, so it was fundraising, using people on the street, and then knocking on doors, I did that too. Then I switched over to get-out-the-vote operations, which involved calling a lot of people, primarily to recruit neighborhood volunteers. So yeah, I got a lot of cold-calling experience at a young age too, and definitely identified patterns over time.
Paven Malhotra: Incredibly valuable experience to get. I think a lot of people now, especially in high school or even college, focus on work experiences that are more intellectual, more resume-building. But I really think having some experience in sales is invaluable. I ended up having a lot of those kinds of jobs when I was younger. I worked as a telemarketer, I spent a summer working at FAO Schwarz as a salesperson, and a lot of my relatives and my parents had small businesses where there was a lot of sales involved. I think those experiences are incredibly valuable, formative, and unfortunately often overlooked when people are trying to build their work experience early in life.
Khurram Naik: What's the relationship between rejection and business? How does rejection lead to the success you're having now with these frontier AI copyright disputes?
Paven Malhotra: I think for better or worse you really need to build some resilience, and I think that was one of the things that helped me in that telemarketing experience, because honestly my return rate was incredibly low, probably less than 2 percent. I think for anybody involved with business development, involved with sales, your return rate is always going to be less than 50 percent, and you have to be comfortable with that. That takes time to develop, but if you can have that resilience, it positions you so much better for the future, because you're not discouraged when things don't go well, and you keep trying.
Khurram Naik: Let's talk about all these technological waves. One wave you were early to, but that didn't pan out, was 3D printing. Can you talk about what you saw in that opportunity, and what you did to lay the foundation? If I understand correctly, that was the first bet you made on what you saw as a frontier technology.
Paven Malhotra: Sure. I'd say in the 2010 to 2013 time period, something around there, 3D printing and additive manufacturing was getting a lot of interest and attention, and it was something I thought was pretty revolutionary, the ability of people to manufacture things on their own using 3D printers, and also the ability to use it at commercial scale. I spent a bunch of time trying to learn the technology, went to a bunch of industry conferences, spoke to a lot of people in the space, gave a bunch of CLEs in the space. I was interested in it, I enjoyed doing it, but it didn't end up leading to anything on the business development front. I thought there was going to be a lot of IP issues touching that particular space, but at the end of the day there really weren't. So that's just another example of how part of business development is trying things, sometimes they work out, sometimes they don't.
Khurram Naik: How did that prepare you for this AI copyright wave? Tell me about the timeline. When did you start catching wind of this, taking an interest in it? What led you to apply the playbook you'd used before? Were there any refinements?
Paven Malhotra: Sure. I'd say around mid to late 2022 I had started getting very interested in new developments happening with AI and machine learning. I'd actually been exposed to machine learning back in 2016. I had a secondment at a large tech company then, and part of my job was to review research papers prior to their publication, doing a legal review, and a lot of the research papers I was reviewing at that time were focused on machine learning and its application to different business processes. So I'd been exposed to that area and had been reading a bunch of technical materials for a few years before 2022. But I'd say in 2022 things really took off in this space. You had the release of ChatGPT in the fall of 2022, and since I'd already been tracking and reading about this space, I became more interested once I was actually able to try the technology out. I still remember the first time I tried ChatGPT, it was mind-blowing, the ability of this tool to answer any kind of question or starter I entered. I was interested in the technology, started reading more about it, and then in early 2023 there was a frontier model AI company I started working with, mainly doing product counseling and general legal advice. The work started slowly, and I kept being interested, and whenever I saw cases I thought touched that space, I did whatever I could to get involved. That's how it developed. By mid to late 2023 you began to see more litigation in this space, and by that point I had a bunch of expertise and experience, had done some speaking in the space, and was positioned to try to get that kind of work.
Khurram Naik: How did you develop expertise in the technical subject matter?
Paven Malhotra: A lot of it just involved spending the time to understand the technology: reading research papers, watching tech tutorial videos, following newsletters in that particular space.
Khurram Naik: When you started developing your thesis for what might unfold in the space, we've now had several years of disputes since then. How did it play out differently from your initial thesis?
Paven Malhotra: I think the thing I didn't anticipate originally was that a lot of these disputes around AI would transcend copyright. Originally I'd been thinking this was really a copyright issue exclusively, and obviously it is a copyright issue, but what's happened since those early days is that the breadth of legal issues has exploded. You have pure copyright issues, DMCA issues, and now product liability issues, where lawsuits are being filed saying the product itself is defective, because it gave certain advice or certain outputs that led to some consequence, like somebody tragically committing suicide, or something of that sort. There are also issues of privacy that have developed, and issues surrounding agentic AI and who's responsible for how an agent operates. Those are things I hadn't anticipated when I first looked at this space, the mushrooming of different kinds of legal disputes that arise against not just frontier model companies, but frankly any company incorporating AI into its products.
Khurram Naik: Right now you're in the thick of it. This is hard, litigating these cases, for some of the reasons we've talked about. Is it proportionally as gratifying as it is hard? Or is the really fun, gratifying stuff the early-stage, building-something-from-a-foundation part? What's the sweet spot for you?
Paven Malhotra: I think for most cases there's an initial high when you get a case, and then you may not get a high for a while, unless maybe you get an early dispositive motion victory. Between the start of the case and its resolution there's a big slog, particularly if you're in discovery. You just have to put your head down and keep trucking along. Discovery is the majority of most cases, and it's challenging.
Khurram Naik: So there's the initial dopamine hit. Let's talk about resilience and longevity in your practice. You've been at this for 20 years. What's sustaining you now? You clearly seek out frontier issues, but now the frontier is just what you're all working on litigating day to day. How do you allocate time and energy to frontier stuff, to get that boost and keep going, when you're already so busy in the thick of it?
Paven Malhotra: There are only 24 hours in a day. What I try to do is, at the start of each day, read a bunch of different news sources and try to pick up what's happening. One thing I try to do is not just look at legal news sources, but actually look at industry-specific news sources, things that expose me to stuff I otherwise wouldn't be exposed to: new startups getting funded, new companies getting acquired, new technologies being developed. I just try to soak in as much as I can and follow my curiosity. I try to spend at least a little time on that every day. I personally find it interesting, but it's also useful for building out a practice and thinking about what's going to happen long term.
Khurram Naik: How do you leverage that? Your threshold for pain was built cold calling eight hours a day, maybe that's something easier to sustain at 17 or 18, and maybe that threshold has receded a bit since then. But regardless, that foundation took the edge off that outrage, that acceptance of rejection. Is there some way you leverage that skill today?
Paven Malhotra: I think frankly this is probably true of anybody who's an immigrant, or the child of immigrants, you generally have a high threshold for pain, that's how you get through life. I think the important thing is trying to have perspective. To be able to do high-velocity, high-complexity work over the long term, you have to find some way to have perspective and balance, and that's super important, because there are a lot of highs and lows in any kind of job, including litigation. I've always been very interested in positive psychology, and in what it can teach me, both in terms of how I manage my life, my stress, and how I manage my teams. I think that's helped me stay grounded, in addition to whatever experience I had early on with rejection, or having a high threshold for pain.
Khurram Naik: As the child of an immigrant, if there's one principle from positive psychology you'd say is the most dominant, the one you use the most, what would you say that is?
Paven Malhotra: I think the thing that's resonated for me is the notion that you have to create your own meaning in the world. There's a lot of randomness, a lot of contingency, that happens in anybody's day-to-day life, and it can be easy, in the chaos of that randomness, to think we don't have agency, or there's no purpose or meaning in what we're doing and what's happening to us. One of the important teachings that's resonated with me from positive psychology is that you have to create your own meaning. I talked earlier about the importance of storytelling, and that notion is important not just for how you present a case to a judge, or facts to a client, but for grounding yourself, thinking about where life has taken you to this point, what you're doing right now, where you're going in the future, and building a narrative for yourself to help impose some kind of meaning on what otherwise might seem like complete randomness.
Khurram Naik: In a random society, someone could say, fine, there's randomness, I'm working these huge, difficult cases, and it's not random, it's very specific, but it's demanding, and I'm not even sure why I'm doing this, maybe this is just shuffling money from one big company to another, or something like that. For people who feel that way, can you share, on a macro or a micro scale, what narrative you find resonant?
Paven Malhotra: I think there are a lot of different narratives. One is how the work I'm doing fits into a broader purpose. I mentioned earlier that one thing that's been important to me, a thread through different cases, is how the work I do on a case not only helps my client, but what role I play in facilitating future progress for a particular industry or technology. That's one narrative that grounds me, helps me position my client better, but also gives me some purpose in what I'm doing day to day. Another narrative is what I'm doing to help, for example, as a manager of my teams. In that role, one narrative and source of meaning is how I can help my team members bring their best selves to whatever they're doing, or help develop their talents and grow. Having a narrative and a purpose in different dimensions of your life is really important, because it gives you a framework, and frankly some motivation and inspiration to help you do whatever you're trying to accomplish day to day.
Khurram Naik: I love that. It's like the present value of your future activities. There's always a case that's going to have some form of impact on an industry, or on my team, and what's the present value that keeps me going? I really like that.
Paven Malhotra: Mm-hmm.
Khurram Naik: Paven, I wish we had more time.
Paven Malhotra: Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you, Khurram. You ask a lot of questions that draw out insights I wouldn't otherwise be thinking about for myself, so it's been a great conversation, and I've enjoyed it.
Khurram Naik: I enjoyed getting to speak with you today.