Anuradha Maheshwari: Programming Law for the Age of Intelligence

A few months ago, when a luxury fashion house found itself accused of copying a centuries old traditional footwear design, public debate raged in India about ownership and fairness. The brand offered partnership with the footwear artisans of the region it had imitated, as damage control. While the episode is behind us, it brought up important questions about cultural misappropriation, intellectual theft and ownership of ideas.

Today, with Artificial intelligence taking over literature, inventions and scientific developments, music, cinema and entertainment and of course consumer products, the issue assumes gigantic proportions, especially as huge volumes of trade and commerce ride on commercially rich ‘intellectual properties’. One only has to look at the distribution rights of big budget films, or the satellite rights of popular sporting events or big budget music concerts to understand that not only is creativity abundant, but that the stakes involved are sky high and disputes between parties arise routinely, with multimillion dollar claims. She points out that despite the laws, protection remains uneven and sometimes wobbly, because law cannot imagine or insure against every situation. Understanding about the nuances and complexities of the involved laws and their application to disputes, builds gradually.

Anuradha Maheshwari’s career lies at this intersection of innovation, creativity and accountability. A lawyer by profession, an academic by choice, she is the Founder and Managing Partner of Lex Mantis, a legal firm that helps creators, corporates, entrepreneurs, and institutions understand how ideas acquire value, how they are to be protected and monetized and how to navigate the demands of law.

Building Law as a Living Discipline

When Anuradha began teaching, India’s intellectual-property (IP) landscape was nascent and budding with interest. She was invited to manage one of India’s first academic centers dedicated to the subject of IP, and build a pedagogy around it, with little precedence to rely on.

“I had to learn the subject before I could teach it,” she recalls. “That turned out to be the best training possible.”

She encouraged students to study products, inventions, films, and even slogans as intellectual property, asking who created them, what gave them value, and how they could be protected.

Requests for advice on management of intellectual property soon followed from founders, designers, producers, artists and small manufacturers struggling with first-time filings. She soon realized that she had found her feet and was ready to start her independent practice and provide the same clarity and perspective to an issue as she had in her classrooms.

She recalls one of her early successes, when one of her first clients, a startup snack manufacturer, faced a trademark infringement threat from a global giant, but she through her arguments convinced the global player, about the glaring differences in the names and that their infringement complaint could not be sustained. The matter was fortunately withdrawn, saving the start-up crores in money that would have to be spent defending the infringement action.

When Innovation Outruns Ownership

Her broader concern is governance complacency, treating rules as fixed and beyond amendment, especially in the face of changing boundaries of creativity.

“Law must evolve with the evolving human landscape, otherwise, it becomes irrelevant.” She maintains. “After all the world’s big powers and industrial economies were built on ownership,” and that system will continue for ages to come.

For example, Patent law was developed to encourage innovation and innovators, but should it also accord the same level of protection to machines as humans?

Today with ubiquitous digital technologies and artificial intelligence pervading every corner of our lives, legal boundaries have shifted, especially with machine learning composing symphonies, draft codes, and generating visual art that rivals human creativity. The question is whether the law should treat that creativity equally on par with humans and grant machines ownership in their creations. “Law cannot chase technology or innovation,” she says, rather “Good laws are designed to anticipate it and build around new developments” and better laws have to be made accordingly. She believes that law follows technology and invention and regulation springs from the outcome of technologies or unanticipated situations created by them.

India, in her view, stands at an interesting inflection point. Its creative diversity of scientists, filmmakers, weavers, and coders makes it uniquely suited to build a culture of protection that respects both novelty, originality and tradition, the hall marks of IP protection. Keeping these legal principles firmly in place, her firm Lex Mantis helps software and other startups file patents and assists the big players and the small in protecting the valuable ideas they have generated. She asserts that often times people do not have an understanding of what can be protected and what cannot be. The general impression is that all intellectual properties can be secured by a patent or a copyright, and people use the expressions interchangeably.

Law, Empathy & Judgment

Her philosophy however, has remained consistent. The purpose of law is not control but to secure order in society and human position. “Rules without rationale are empty and cannot be sustained”. That conviction has shaped her teaching and her firm’s services. Interns and young lawyers are encouraged to look for the motives behind behavior, and not merely the clauses in a contract. “Good lawyers interpret documents. Great ones interpret people,” she says. Her team spends hours simplifying contracts for their clients that would otherwise drown in legalese.

“Comprehension is power,” she says. “If creators do not understand their rights, they cannot defend them.”

Alongside her specialization in the field of IP, she also emphasizes that the Firm provides considerable services in the area of contract management, corporate and commercial transactions and data privacy. She says data protection is an imperative for today’s world order, “Data protection is not about secrecy; it is about preserving agency.”

Empathy as Infrastructure

For Anuradha, empathy is not sentiment but system design. “Process can be automated. Care cannot.” She tries to embed empathy into her daily practice. New lawyers are encouraged to question her and defend their reasoning. “Disagreement is healthy,” she says. “It keeps the firm honest.” Because of her approachable persona and attitude, her former students of more than 40 years still keep in touch with her.

Anuradha’s Leadership Lessons

• Law is a system of understanding, not control: Leadership thrives when authority evolves from merely enforcing to rationalizing. The same holds true for any institution built to outlast its founders.

• Integrity is a long game: Principles tested by pressure define the real substance of a leader. Credibility compounds when ethics cost something.

• Collaboration is a higher form of strategy: The smartest negotiations preserve dignity on both sides. Winning that isolate is only another form of loss.

• Empathy is an institutional skill: Kindness works best when it is designed into process. Sustainable performance depends on how systems treat people, not just how they measure them.

• Comprehension is the new currency of power: In complex environments, understanding replaces hierarchy as the engine of progress. Clarity without depth no longer holds value.

• Law must learn to think like technology: Rules should evolve and self-correct as fast as the systems they govern. Stagnant regulation is a silent failure of imagination.

• Transparency accelerates progress: Openness aligns incentives faster than secrecy protects them. When people see how systems work, trust follows naturally.

• Education and enterprise are one continuum: Learning is not a prelude to work but its extension. The best institutions turn every outcome into instruction.

• Leadership is the discipline of listening: Challenge refines judgment. Leaders who invite dissent create organizations capable of surviving their own success.

• Innovation demands moral literacy: Technical intelligence without ethical depth destabilizes progress. The future belongs to those who can balance invention with introspection.

The Conscience of Progress

History rarely remembers the tools a generation invents. It remembers the choices it made while using them.

Anuradha Maheshwari’s work begins with that understanding. To her, law is pushing boundaries and reimagining existing development structures, and a collective, public attempt to keep innovation tethered to ethics. “As societies become more capable,” she says, “they must also evolve meaningfully.”

The future, she believes, will reward those who move with purpose, not haste. “Intelligence is easy to build,” she adds with a half-smile. “Wisdom takes patience.”