Welcome to the latest instalment of Managing IP’s ‘Five minutes with’ series, where we learn more about IP practitioners and professionals on a personal and professional level.
This time, we meet Patrícia Paias, partner at MFA Legal & Tech in Portugal.
Someone asks you at a party what you do for a living. What do you say?
I tell them I'm a lawyer who works where innovation meets the law. Then I make it concrete: "Think of the brands you trust, the medicines you take, the technology changing how we live. I help the companies behind them protect their ideas, stay compliant, and win when it counts, so that innovation actually reaches the market."
At heart, I help businesses turn good ideas into commercial success. I love the point where IP, competition, regulatory and litigation meet, because that's where the interesting problems live.
Talk us through a typical working day.
There isn't one, and that's the appeal. I start early, before the children wake, clearing my inbox. After the school run, it's drafting, client calls across time zones, teamwork, and strategic thinking, often weaving an IP dispute, a regulatory question and a competition angle into one commercial decision. Then the second shift at home: homework, dinner, bedtime, and one last look at my inbox.
What are you working on at the moment?
Cross-border work at the intersection of IP, competition and regulatory law, moving between Portuguese procedure and pan-European strategy, including the Unified Patent Court and the European Commission. I help clients defend their rights and understand how competition and regulatory dynamics shape their commercial options and how to secure market access. The common thread: high-stakes, technically complex matters where clients need rigour, judgment, and someone who understands their business.
Does one big piece of work usually take priority, or are you juggling multiple things?
Both, always. One major matter usually sets the tempo, a filing, a hearing, a deadline, and everything else arranges around it. But juggling is the job, and I enjoy it, because the sharpest insights come from connecting a litigation issue to a regulatory constraint or competition risk. Running a boutique practice and a household of three teaches the same discipline: know what can't slip, protect that, and stay calm about the rest.
What is the most exciting aspect of your role, and what is the most stressful?
The most exciting part is being close to innovation and the client's business, connecting IP, regulatory and competition threads into a clear strategy that helps the client succeed, not just win a legal point. The most stressful is the flip side: responsibility. When stakes are high and deadlines don't move, you carry it. Holding that pressure without letting it hold you is a career-long apprenticeship.
Tell us the key characteristics that make a successful IP lawyer/practitioner.
Curiosity first, because you're always learning the science and business behind a client's rights. Then precision, because the details are the case. What's underrated is commercial judgment and the ability to think across disciplines, seeing how IP, competition and regulatory issues interact, and explaining it simply enough for a board to act on. You have to genuinely care whether the client succeeds. And resilience, because this work is adversarial.
What is the most common misconception about IP?
That it's a niche formality you "file and forget". In reality, IP is often a company's most valuable asset, and it's bound up with competition rules, regulatory frameworks and commercial strategy. The other misconception is that protection is automatic. It isn't. Rights must be built deliberately, maintained carefully, and defended actively, and businesses that treat IP as an afterthought discover its true value only when it's under threat.
What or who inspires you?
My children, unfashionable as it may be to admit, because they keep me honest about what truly matters. Professionally, I’m inspired by the resilience and risk appetite of the innovators and founders I work with—people who have devoted years to building a single idea into a business, proving that it’s possible to succeed without pretending the tension isn’t real.
If you weren’t in IP, what would you be doing?
I’d be a physician. What does a physician have in common with a lawyer? Very little, I suspect. Yet if I hadn't become a lawyer, I would almost certainly have become a physician.
Any advice you would give your younger self?
Don´t wait to feel completely ready—you never will, and the ambitious choices are worth making anyway. My years abroad taught me the most precisely because they were uncomfortable. That’s where I learned to see the law as part of the business rather than separate from it, and to trust my own judgment over the crowd’s.
I’d also tell her that balance doesn’t mean doing everything by conventional standards or in the conventional way. It means choosing what matters most in each season, on your own terms, and forgiving yourself for the rest.
What is your motto in life?
"Winter always turns into spring". If it makes you happy, chase it, and chase it with everything you've got, on your own terms. Don´t do everything at half attention just to meet expectations that were never really yours.
