Tsan Abrahamson (Part 1): The Human Side of Intellectual Property Law

Welcome to the Legacy All Stars podcast. We feature inspirational stories from people who dedicate themselves to helping others. Here is your host, Alan Pavloski.

Welcome back to the Legacy All Stars podcast where we celebrate inspirational people making a difference in the lives of others. On this episode of the Legacy All Stars podcast, I am honored to welcome my close friend, Zan Abrahamson. Zan is a trusted voice in the world of intellectual property law and brand protection, helping companies and entrepreneurs protect their most valuable ideas. But what makes her story truly powerful is the way she combines professional expertise with a heart for service, mentoring, philanthropy, and a genuine commitment to helping others, me included.

Together, we'll explore how protecting ideas and protecting people intersect and how Zan's values driven approach shapes both her career and her legacy. Welcome to the show, my friend. Great to see you as always.

It's always great to see you. Thank you for having me.

My pleasure. Before we jump into the questions, we probably won't cover a proverbial bazillionth of the dynamic knowledge base you possess, which I know about, having spent so much time with you, but you have an encyclopedic knowledge of two of my favorite subjects, music and food.

Which we might need to wait for another episode to cover. But today we are talking IP and legacy building. Maybe slip in a little Steely Dan trivia, but let's get started.

Sounds great.

Look, you've built an incredible career in intellectual property law. What first drew you to the field?

You know, a couple of things, but I kind of like to tell this story because it's the most interesting. I was in law school, kind of doing the stuff that we do, and. And one of my teachers, I recognized his name, but not as a professor. And I walked up to him and I said, do I know you from somewhere? He was actually younger than I was. And he said, no, I don't think you do. And I said, your name sounds so familiar. And he said, well, maybe you know my mom. And I said, your mom? And he said, yeah, my mom was actually a chef.

And she wrote a cookbook or two. And so if you have those cookbooks, you might know her. And sure enough, I went back, looked at my library, and I did. And I just thought this guy was so funny and quirky and interesting, and he had fun stories to tell, you know, about his family and his mom that like a lot of things that we do. I stumbled into intellectual property because I stumbled into a professor who was so excited about it. And so that's sort of what drew me in. What kept me in, quite frankly, is of all the kinds of law that you can practice, there are two things that I really love about this. The first is that intellectual property law is one of those things you can talk to anybody about, because everybody watches TV or listens to the radio or listens to podcasts or reads magazines, and they've got some opinion about a song or a brand or a jingle. So one, is this kind of universally interesting to people, and that's just a lot of fun. Right. It's culturally relevant. It changes all the time. And two is as a lawyer, and this is kind of why I stay, nobody dies, nobody loses their kids, nobody loses their house, nobody's going to prison. Like, honestly, I can practice this kind of law and I can make a difference in the world, and I'm so grateful to those lawyers who do that kind of more difficult work. But for me, I can really do a service without sort of always feeling like winning or losing a battle means someone is going to really be damaged. That's a why I was drawn in. Great professor. And why I stay in is because it's this wonderful, relevant place where I can be and still be sort of practicing it, making a difference, but having fun.

Yeah. I mean, as two people that both appreciate the arts and creativity, it's just so important to protect the people that create that intellectual property, because without that protection, we just would not have the kind of dynamic, beautiful range of performances and writers and things that we really appreciate without that protection. So for me, it's one of my favorite things about what you do is that you protect people that are creative, that need to be protected from those that might undermine their ability to make a living. So I really love that. Intellectual property can sound really technical, but at its core, it's about protecting that creativity. Can you share an example where your work had a very human impact?

Sure, absolutely. A couple of things come to mind. First of all, just a quick background on intellectual property for people who kind of don't know. Intellectual property is protected in four major ways. The first is patents, and patents protect an idea that you have. The second is trademarks. Trademarks protect any word, name, symbol, device, sound that is associated with a good or service. Copyrights protect the expression of an idea. So an original work of authorship, a song that you recorded, a book that you wrote, a play that you developed, and so forth. And. And then finally, trade secret, which is more of a corporate intellectual property. Right. But those four are sort of the big four, and I do want to say something about them. Which is you talked about the fact that intellectual property protects creators, and it does. And sometimes we get a little pushback on that. Like, why can't everything be free? Why can't we share stuff? We can and we do. And one of the nice things about intellectual property is that it's only a limited right. It's both limited in scope, how much you can protect, and it's limited in duration. Meaning, for instance, a copyright is the life of the author who created it, plus 70 years. Patents are different, depending on what they are, but they're all fairly limited to a couple of decades or less. And then trademarks are limited in scope because you're only going to get it for a very few things that you produce. And this is important because the drafters of all these laws, and this goes to the point about making an impact, the drafters of all these laws did in fact, understand that.

You want ideas and concepts and things to be in the diaspora. You want people to be able to take advantage of other people's creativity because that begets more creativity. But you discourage creativity when people can't make a living from it. And so that's why we have a limited right. So I love that you said, you know, this fosters and supports creativity because that's exactly what it's designed to do. It's designed to strike the balance between allowing the world to benefit from all of these creative works and giving people a limited right to make money from it. I suppose the one that I'm kind of most proud of is in what I do. We have clients all over the country. And so I'm off and on a plane, and I was sitting in a taxi in D.C. well, taxi rideshare. And the guy was saying to me, hey, do you like music? And I said, sure, I love music. And he reached back and he handed me a cd and he said, this is my original music.

And I said, oh, that's fantastic. Are you selling these? And he said, no, you know, I just really just wanted you to, you know, check it out, check it out. It's really good. Some house music, some this and that. And he said, it's none of that. You know, I'm not sampling from anybody. This is my own stuff. And I said, well, congratulations. I said, do you have a copyright on it? And he said, yeah, I mailed it to myself.

And I said, yeah, that's not really a copyright. It's kind of a poor man's copyright. But it's not going to do anything for you if somebody steals your Content. And he said, are you kidding? You know, this is what we've always been told. And the fun part of the story is. So I started to get a little bit technical with him and say, no, you really have to get a copyright. I'm going to direct you to a website where you can do it yourself if you can't afford an attorney, it's really important. And he said, do you have some time? I want to make a detour. And he was very excited. And I did. I wasn't speaking until the next morning. He was taking me to my hotel. I said, sure. So he turned, he ended the ride and then he drove me to a barber shop. True story. Where his friends were. And he said, this lady has something to say and I think it's really important. And we spent the next two hours talking about what happens when content gets released and there's no ownership taken of it. And specifically we talked about something called orphan works, which are when things get created, photographs get made, songs get written, stories get written and someone finds them and they can't find the owner. Right. They can't find the parents of that creative work. They're called orphan works. And the way the law works in the US a lot of those orphan works end up getting used and exploited by artists because they have made an effort to find the owner to pay them for the work they want to use in a movie, but they can't find that person. And a lot of this happens in black and brown communities or underserved communities, communities of women, low income people, because they don't understand their rights. And so I was able to give this sort of impromptu lecture in a barber shop with people asking me questions. I was able to pull up my computer, teach them how to fill out a copyright application and create some ownership for them. And I got a bunch of emails after that just saying, thank you, this is really great, we're going to keep doing that. And so that was a lot of fun for me. And it was also a way that I felt like I was making an impact.

Wow. And all the time I've known you, I've never heard that story. That's amazing.

Yeah, it's a fun story, isn't it? And by the way, one of the things I told them was, I said, have you seen these wonderful documentaries about the Civil War or about the Civil rights movement or about the Black Panthers? And one of the things is, a lot of these filmmakers are privileged people. They come from privilege. That's why they've got a master's in fine arts from Stanford, and they're getting funding and so forth. And a lot of people who are in underserved communities just don't have the kind of money to do that.

Right.

Most of the photographs that were taken of the civil rights movement are taken by black and brown people in church basements and in fact, in barber shops where these meetings were being held. And they're being exploited by people because none of those photographs ever had a copyright on them. So this is a way to really explain it and to get these guys to go, oh, yeah, I always wondered about that. And now their music, okay, maybe no one's ever going to pay for it. But if there's a copyright on there, and if that CD that that cab driver gave me to listen to actually ends up in the hands of a producer, there's going to be a copyright on file and he can reach out. Maybe he only gets 2,000 bucks for it, but that's 2,000 bucks more than he would have gotten.

Yeah, for sure.

In addition to your legal background, you also received your MBA and you have extensive business experience. How does that change the lens with which you view intellectual property legal work?

That's a great question. One of the things about being in the Silicon Valley adjacent, because we're here in the Bay Area, is that there is a ton of startup energy here and lots of startup businesses. Whether we're dealing with a startup or we're dealing with a company that has a storied history, One of the things that we always want to do as lawyers is be a net positive gain to the bottom line. And I gotta tell you, when you are talking, whether it's a startup company or otherwise, they are counting their pennies, number one. And number two, the last thing they want to do is spend their money on legal. They want to spend it on marketing, they want to spend it on product development, they want to spend it on business development, but they don't want to spe on legal. And so what we have tried to do and where my MBA comes in is to try to do two things. One is approach all legal issues from a business perspective. And I can give you an example of what that looks like.

Well, I'll do it right now. So for instance, client says to me, I got somebody infringing my trademark.

And this is driving me crazy. Let's sue them. We need to sue them. Okay, yeah, I can definitely sue them. Looks like you got them dead to rights. Do you know how much a lawsuit is going to cost? And not only in dollars, but in how much time it's going to take for you to secure documentation, for me to work with somebody dedicated to pulling information from you for me to broker all this. Or we could file suit, that we can do. But you're talking about 100 grand in a year. How about we formulate a strategy that seeks to give net positive gain to the other side as well as you for just stopping using the trademark. Even if it's going to cost you two grand to pay them to get rid of their product. Right. Put away that visceral anger that you have and let's look at the big picture. And so the MBA definitely does that. We try to give people a cost effective solution that may look circuitous or may not look like something you would see on an L A Law episode, but is actually much more efficient and gets them where they want to be for far fewer resources. So that's the first part. And then the second part of the MBA is used to really get clients to understand that the corporate part of what we do, the non adverse part, just the counseling, is hopefully designed to create both a strategy for moving forward in their branding and in their, you know, in developing their organization, but also to actually create the kind of barriers to entry that keep third parties from infringing your trademarks and your copyrights. Getting a copyright registration early on means you're going to get statutory damages and that's going to keep would be infringers from trampling over your rights. Getting trademark applications on file very early in the development of your product and business is going to save you thousands of dollars using watch notices and so forth. So what we try to do is we try to approach every single legal decision we make with a business argument. And if it doesn't make sense from a business perspective, we're still going to give you what the legal landscape is, but we're going to try to motivate you to take the business course to a decision that's going to work for you.

The proverbial ounce of prevention, right?

Absolutely. Almost always.

Yeah, for sure. Let's shift gears a little bit. As a woman in leadership in a male dominated field, what challenges have you faced and how have you turned them into opportunities to mentor others?

Wow, that's a good question. So, fun story. When I first started, I had the classic corporate photograph on the website and I would get referrals and I would talk to the people on the referral. I'd give them great advice, I'd give them great information and I'd leave this potential client. And invariably they would say something like, wow, this has been really great. Got some really great information. We're interviewing some other firms and we'll call you back. And our hit rate was about 50%, which at the time I thought was pretty good because I came from a marketing background. And, you know, you get 2%. That's good, right? So it was 50%. I said, but one of the things that troubled me was the fact that I would get these people at the end of the conversation who would say, wow, this was the best call I have had. And then they'd say, hey, do you have a website? Can I read some more about you? But I got to tell you, really great information. And then I'd get the email from that very same person saying, hey, we decided to go with another firm, by the way. It was a firm that I knew very well. And I said to my mom, I express the frustration of my mom. She said, it's because you're black. And I realize it's not male dominated, but you know, in legal profession, lots of women. But she says, because you're black. And I said, well, I mean, they're talking to me on the phone, they must know I'm bl. She's no, they don't go to the website until after the referral and then they see you. She said, put up a picture of something else. She goes, don't you have a ski picture? And I said, yeah. She said, put up the ski picture. This is absolutely true story. So I put up a ski picture myself, telemark skiing, and I had a full helmet with a mask on. You couldn't tell if I was black, white or green. You've seen that picture? Yeah. And also you couldn't tell if I was a woman or a man. I just looked like a skier.

My hit rate went to 90%.

And so I guess that's a very short way of saying, I know it exists. I've experienced it. And the goal is to get people over the hump of thinking of you as a brown person or thinking of you as a woman, and making sure that you're giving them every opportunity to think of you as the best attorney that can represent them. And by doing that, by removing that. And again, we're talking about institutionalized kinds of gender bias or racism. These people don't know that they're doing this. They just may have a visceral response when you remove the visceral response and they are forced to just listen to you and talk to you and hear your advice. They're going to go with you. And that is actually the advice that I give both to young women and actually, honestly, young men, to people of color and particularly Gen Z's. And here's why. One of the things that has happened over time, right, is that we have become more casual in nature. You know, CEOs wear hoodies. People aren't necessarily impressed with your pedigree, right? There's programmers out there, there's CEOs who never even went to college. And generally speaking, that's a great thing. Just because you wear a suit, it doesn't mean you're smart. Just because you didn't go to college, it doesn't mean you can't program. You can't be a great CEO. So I applaud that, generally speaking. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be rising to a certain level of presentation and appearance. And the further down you are on the social scale, I don't care if you're in a wheelchair. I don't care if you have a weight challenge. I don't care if you're brown or whatever your gender is. If it's more likely that someone is going to judge you on this thing that you can't help and not on your brain, which you can help, then you have to make an effort. World's not fair. You have to make an effort to get the person who's on the other side of this to look at you as a brain. And what that means is you remove the stimulus, right? As a brown person, I always wear a suit because I look good, first of all. And second of all, I don't have to worry that they're saying she's not professional. Maybe if I looked like.

The founder of Facebook, I could show up in a hoodie and a T shirt, but I don't. And that's just a reality. So when I'm mentoring others, I'm mentoring a woman right now, I say talk from a place of strength, right? You don't have to be a jerk about it, but don't go. I think, I guess maybe talk from a place of strength and make sure that your appearance is and your materials show that you are prepared, right? I've gone on your website, I've read your bio, I've done all this. And then a little something from Truman Capote. In his biography, he used to say one of the reasons he got all these really juicy tidbits from people, which of course he later exploited to his own advantage, was that he would give them a little juicy tidbit. And so as a lawyer, even if I don't yet have a client, one of the things I'll do is I'll spend the time, half an hour, hour, whatever it is, to do a deep dive into their matter and say, hey, I don't know everything yet. You're not retained yet. This isn't legal advice yet because you're not retained. But here are some big picture ideas that I have about your company. 99% of the time, other lawyers have not done that. They basically say, when you pay me, I'll give you advice. I give them a little tidbit, and then they understand how I operate. But I also show up in a suit. I also show up with paper, which I know as well as digital stuff, just in case someone wants a real business card, just in case someone wants that sort of tactile, legit street cred that you're a good attorney and that moves them off whatever narrative they have socially, that you're, you know, a woman and maybe, I don't know, emotional, whatever their stereotype is, or that you're a brown person, so maybe you won't understand their business the way somebody who's not brown would. So that's it.

This is the end of part one of this very special episode with my good friend Zan Abrahamson talking about IP and service to others.