Competition or Cooperation in AI?

Join us for a LEANZ in-person and online event hosted by Bell Gully in Auckland, where Professor Mark Lemley discusses competition or cooperation in AI. Professor Lemley is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and currently a visiting professor at the University of Auckland School of Law. This seminar is on Wednesday 7th October 2026 at Bell Gully Auckland (Level 14/1 Queen St). Doors open at 5:30pm for drinks and nibbles. The seminar will begin at 6:00pm, finishing at 7:00pm, including some time for questions from attendees. There will be time for networking following the event. Summary of the session: The AI market has seen the first real disruption among tech giants in the last twenty years, as new entrants have dominated frontier models. US companies also face unprecedented competition from Chinese models. But it's not just companies that are competing. Countries are competing for AI leadership even as the leaders themselves say competition is dangerous. What can we expect from the AI market and from the laws that aim to regulate it? About our speaker: Mark Lemley is the William H. Neukom Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and is affiliated faculty in the Symbolic Systems program. He teaches intellectual property, patent law, trademark law, antitrust, the law of robotics and AI, video game law, and remedies. He is the author of 11 books and 229 articles, including the two-volume treatise IP and Antitrust. His works have been cited more than 360 times by courts, including 19 times by the United States Supreme Court, and more than 50,000 times in books and academic articles, making him the most-cited scholar in the world in IP law and the third most cited legal scholar of all time. He has published 9 of the 100 most-cited law review articles of the last twenty years, more than any other scholar. His articles have appeared in 24 of the top 25 law reviews and in top journals in other fields, including Nature Biotechnology, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Machine Learning Research, and the Harvard Business Review. They have been reprinted throughout the world and translated into Chinese, Danish, French, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. He has taught IP law to judges at numerous Federal Judicial Center and ABA programs, has testified eight times before Congress, and has filed more than 80 amicus briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts. Mark cofounded Lex Machina, Inc., a startup company that provides litigation data and analytics to law firms, companies, courts, and policymakers. Lex Machina was acquired by Lexis in December 2015. Mark litigated and counseled clients in all areas of intellectual property, antitrust, and internet law for 35 years at the law firms of Lex Lumina, Durie Tangri, Keker and Van Nest, Fish and Richardson, and Brown and Bain. He has argued 32 federal appellate cases, including before the en banc Federal Circuit, and before the California Supreme Court, as well as numerous district court cases. He has participated in more than three dozen cases in the United States Supreme Court as counsel or amici. His client base was diverse and has included Genentech, Dykes on Bikes, generative AI companies, video game companies, artists, computer scientists, and nearly every significant Internet company. Mark has been named California Lawyer's Attorney of the Year twice. He received the California State Bar’s inaugural IP Vanguard Award. He won the 2024 Mark Banner Award from the American Bar Association and the 2018 World Technology Award for Law. In 2017 he received the P.J. Federico Award from the Patent and Trademark Office Society. Back when he was young, he was named a Young Global Leader by the Davos World Economic Forum and Berkeley Law School’s Young Alumnus of the Year. He has been recognized as one of the top 50 litigators in the country under 45 and one of the 25 most influential people in IP by American Lawyer, one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the nation by the National Law Journal, and one of the 10 most admired attorneys in IP by IP360. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, and the IP Hall of Fame. Mark clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He has previously taught at Berkeley Law School and the University of Texas School of Law. In 2026 he serves as a visiting professor at the University of Auckland School of Law. In his spare time, Mark enjoys cooking, travel, yoga, and video games (at this writing Pragmata). Details for online attendance to be updated soon