Michael is the CEO and President of Paximal, joining the company in July 2023. In this role, he oversees and is responsible for the strategic, financial, and operational leadership of the company.
Immediately before joining Paximal, Michael was the patent practice group leader at Holland & Hart, and he was the founding partner of that group. He was widely recognized as one of the top outside patent counsel in the world, serving companies like Qualcomm, Micron, and Salesforce, among many others. During his tenure there, he grew the work he managed from $2M to $30M+ annually. His team grew to 70+ patent attorneys, agents, and engineers, and together they created new automation and workflow management solutions that were a key differentiator.
Michael was named the U.S. National Practitioner of the Year for Patent Prosecution for 2022 by Managing IP, and was a finalist in 2021 and 2023 as well. The team he led garnered Holland & Hart the Managing IP Patent Prosecution Firm of the Year (West) in 2023.
Ian is an accomplished intellectual property strategist and a pioneer in law practice innovation. Through AI and lean production principles, he focuses on enhancing routine writing tasks and workflows traditionally carried out by attorneys, which he studied first-hand during his decade of practice at boutique and global law firms.
As a Stanford Law School CodeX Fellow, Ian leads the Machine-Generated Legal Documents project. He co-founded Specifio, the first commercially-available patent application content generator, and Draft Builders, a platform providing on-demand drafting support for law firms through a network of vetted patent attorneys.
Among other activities in the legal community, Ian serves as Chair of the American Intellectual Property Law Association's Emerging Technologies Committee, helped found both the Practice Innovation and Artificial Intelligence Subcommittees, and is a member of the AI Task Force.
William Wong is widely recognized for his remarkable contributions in the areas of technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Throughout his career, Mr. Wong has consistently achieved groundbreaking milestones, particularly in the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). His pioneering spirit shines through as he co-invented and patented the world's first statistical machine translation (SMT) system, an accomplishment celebrated by the European Patent Office. He holds a number of patents in these areas.
Beyond innovation, Mr. Wong's leadership prowess is evident in his strategic approach to technology. He specializes in optimizing products, managing teams, streamlining processes, and facilitating seamless integration. His impressive track record includes scaling experimental systems from their inception to processing hundreds of millions of transactions monthly, all while effectively coordinating cross-continental teams.
Notably, he spent the last 6 years at Amazon in a senior PM role in developing and launching AWS Translate, which approached parity with Google Translate in just three years, underscores his capacity for driving transformative change and technological innovation. In addition to his technical expertise, Mr. Wong is a serial entrepreneur.
