Ola Adekunle

Patent Counsel, Google LLC

By Katlin Swisher

Born and raised in Nigeria, Ola Adekunle came to West Virginia to further his education. The oldest of three children, he was the first person in his immediate family to attend college. Today, he is a patent lawyer for Google, LLC, where he uses his law and MBA degrees from West Virginia University (WVU) to help scientists and engineers protect their discoveries and inventions.

As a child, Adekunle dreamed of becoming a scientist. He pursued this dream first by earning an associate’s degree from Shepherd University and then a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from WVU. That dream almost didn’t materialize, though, because of hardships brought on by his international student status that made it nearly impossible for him to get an internship or financial aid. Through hard work and perseverance, as well as the availability of resources at WVU and Shepherd, he was able to earn merit-based scholarships.

“I faced challenges from my first day in the U.S.,” he says. “I wasn’t sure I could fit in, and I didn’t see a lot of people that looked or talked like me. Besides the impostor syndrome, I also wasn’t able to secure any form of financial aid or loans to supplement the limited funds my family had put together. I couldn’t secure engineering internships because of my immigration status. After law school, not a lot of law firms wanted to hire an international student or someone they would have to sponsor. All of these experiences taught me to work even harder and persevere.”

After enrolling in law school at WVU, Adekunle faced a new set of challenges.

“Law school was a totally different beast,” he says. “Engineering and science seemed to have come easy to me because I was an overachieving, straight-A type of student, but law school was extremely difficult. The reading, the lack of definite answers or results and the required writing style were foreign to me. To this day, I still believe my law school classes were more difficult than my engineering classes.”

After graduating from WVU College of Law, Adekunle worked as a patent attorney at boutique intellectual property firms in Virginia and Texas where he learned to draft and prosecute patent applications. Five years later, he joined Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) as in-house counsel, eventually progressing to senior patent counsel, portfolio manager and intellectual property strategist for the servers business unit and HP Labs. During his more than five years with HP, he received the Winners’ Circle Award for excellence and high productivity twice, as well as the Game Changers Award.

“At Hewlett-Packard, I learned to think like a businessperson as well as an attorney by seeing the big picture from a business perspective and coming up with innovative legal solutions,” he says.

Now patent counsel at Google, where he has received the Patents Team MVP Award, Adekunle helps shape Google’s patent portfolio based on analysis of Google and third-party patents, business strategies and products.

“The biggest challenge is being proactive and anticipating threats or obstacles to freedom to operate before they even occur,” says Adekunle. “I work on a team that seeks to proactively identify Google assets that may be leveraged in external patent engagements, such as litigation, licensing, divestiture and acquisition. We have an ambitious and challenging goal of doing this in near real time. This is both exciting and challenging. It requires challenging the status quo and doing things that have never been done by any company in the world. That is typical Google, and I love it.”

Because of the positive experiences Adekunle has had at both Google and WVU, it is his personal mission to expand WVU’s footprint within the tech giant.

“WVU and the state of West Virginia have given me so much,” he says. “The opportunities that were given to me at WVU—scholarships, fellowships and graduate assistantships, as well as a quality education in a supportive atmosphere—have made me who I am today, and I feel indebted. I want to pay this forward and help in any way I can. I truly believe in WVU, and I think it is one of America’s best-kept secrets and that Google can really benefit from its talent pool.”

Adekunle aspires to forge partnerships between Google and WVU to create professional experiences for WVU students and alumni.

“I truly believe there are a lot of similarities between Google and WVU,” he says. “We talk a lot at Google about the traits we look for in job candidates. It so happens those same traits are embedded in the WVU culture—traits like thriving in ambiguity, challenging the status quo, doing the right thing and caring about others and putting them first. WVU seeks to educate students who are largely underserved, to introduce technology to rural places in West Virginia and to move the economy of West Virginia forward. All of these are things Google seeks to do all over the world on a global scale. I can’t think of any two institutions with such similar visions and passions.”

One way in which Adekunle is working to make this vision a reality is through Google’s Legal Summer Institute, a program to improve the pipeline of underrepresented individuals in the legal profession. The institute’s scholars spend a week at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley for training and then complete paid internships with Google’s partner law firms around the U.S. In 2018, WVU was one of the only participating universities to have two students selected from a pool of more than 350 applicants.

“The Legal Summer Institute aims to improve access to careers at tech companies by expanding opportunities and removing barriers for underrepresented talent in the legal industry,” says Adekunle. “I am proud to have been one of the original committee members to birth this vision.

As a graduate of three colleges at WVU—the Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, John Chambers College of Business and Economics and College of Law—Adekunle is also teaming up with faculty and administrators to develop career placement opportunities and create new business models in the state.

“I am trying to connect faculty and leaders at WVU with the right people at Google to find synergies and ways I can help promote WVU’s goals and shine some light on WVU as a fertile place for recruiting top talent and investing in West Virginia’s economy,” he says. “We are just starting to brainstorm, so more to come on that.”

In addition, Adekunle served on the law school’s visiting committee from 2012-2016 and was appointed to the WVU Foundation’s board of directors in 2019.

“The opportunity to serve WVU and the great state of West Virginia means the most to me by far,” he says.

Through these platforms and others, he also seeks opportunities to mentor young and aspiring lawyers and address diversity issues in the legal profession.

“Mentoring is an opportunity for me to give back and help positively shape the life of someone else just like mine has been shaped by others,” says Adekunle. “I feel someone can gain from my life story and experiences.”

Through the Google Street Law program, Adekunle mentors and teaches high schoolers from diverse backgrounds about the practice of law and exposes them to careers in the legal profession, including non-attorney positions. The program seeks to increase the pipeline of diverse students by providing opportunities that may not otherwise be available to them.

“I believe the greatest impact I have lies outside of my day-to-day job for Google but is tied to it because Google has given me the platform and the opportunities to do those things,” he says. “As a member of Google’s patent strategy team, I’ve played a key part in building Google’s ideal patent portfolio, which will enhance our business and engineering teams’ freedom to operate and build great products for our users. But my greater societal impact comes through my work on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives like co-leading Google’s Street Law program, being a core member of the Google Legal Summer Institute and serving as a mentor for the outside counsel diversity mentorship program. All of these initiatives help address the lack of diversity in the legal profession.”

Every day Adekunle is paying forward the kindness he received at WVU. Despite a busy career and raising two sets of twins with his wife, he is committed to helping others and making a difference.

“Giving back has become a way of life for me, just like breathing,” he says. “Personally, I owe a debt of gratitude to the people and institutions that have made it possible for me to achieve my goals and for me to be where I am today. Necessity is laid upon me to give back and help others who need it. I’m passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion issues and giving back in service, money or deeds to people who are less privileged. I choose causes that affect meaningful impact and change, not necessarily in the short term but in the long term.”