Law as a Superpower: Aparna Watal on Brand Protection, AI, and Making the IP System Work for Everyone

ADAPT Industry Spotlight

Aparna Watal was still a teenager in India when she watched her mother take on her state university in a legal dispute. The case was complex, the institution was formidable, and one of the lawyers refused to charge any fees because the client was a teacher and he respected the profession that much. Watal, sitting and watching it all unfold, came away with a conviction she has never lost:

"I just thought, wow, law is truly a superpower," she recalled. "It doesn't matter how small you are, how limited your resources might be. You can take on any institution."

That belief has shaped everything Watal has done since, including the career she built as a trademark attorney in Sydney, the clients she chooses to champion, and the work she now does to make intellectual property more accessible to the businesses and professionals who need it most.

A Path Through Engineering and Into Law

When Watal told her parents she wanted to study law, they were against it. In India at the time, law was seen as a profession for those who had no better options, and she was talented in science and mathematics. Her father was a firm no. So Watal agreed to study chemical engineering first, and she genuinely loved it, particularly the applied sciences dimension. She spent time working as a chemical engineer for a petrochemical company, and for a period she thought that might be the path.

What shifted her was something she describes with measured directness: she was often one of two women in a group of sixty engineers. When you cannot see others like you, she explains, it becomes harder to see your own progression path forward. When the global financial crisis hit and many people returned to university, she took the opening and finally circled back to law.

She assumed that her engineering background would steer her into patent work, and she took an entry-level patent advisory role in-house to get her foot in the door. She quickly realized patents were not the right fit; the first opportunity she got in private practice doing trademarks, she took it and has never looked back. The work moves fast, spans industries, and draws on both her technical background and her creative instincts. One day she might be working with an engineering company; the next, with a fashion startup. The variety, she says, is exactly the point.

Today she leads the trademarks practice at Halfords IP, a specialist IP firm in Sydney. She is also co-chair of the ChIPs Network Australia New Zealand chapter, sits on multiple industry committees, and has been building a platform designed to make the trademark entry experience simpler and more accessible for the businesses that need it most.

AI and the Reactive Posture Problem

Much of Watal's current thinking centers on how artificial intelligence is changing the risk landscape for brand owners, and why the traditional approach to trademark protection is increasingly missing the mark. Her diagnosis of the core problem is straightforward: most businesses think about trademark protection reactively. They register their brand name and logo when they are ready to launch, or they return to IP protection when something goes wrong. Previously, that approach saved the day but in an AI-accelerated environment, she argues, it is genuinely dangerous.

The threat she describes most vividly is impersonation at scale. AI systems can now copy the tone, messaging, and visual identity of a business so convincingly that a fraudulent website becomes nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. She has seen it with her own clients: fake websites with corresponding LinkedIn pages, social media accounts, and employee names drawn from the actual company's roster. Someone stumbling across the fraudulent site would have no reason to doubt it.

"In each of those cases, the business thankfully had the foresight to register their branding at the right time. Because of that, we were able to take action quickly." Without prior registration, she explains, enforcement becomes expensive and difficult, particularly for smaller businesses whose reputations exist but are harder to document in a legal proceeding.

The second AI-driven risk she flags is the proliferation of AI-generated competitor brands. Generative AI makes it trivially easy to produce brand names and logos at scale, which is accelerating the already substantial volume of potentially conflicting marks. Trademark registers are filling faster, and clearance searches are more complex. The work of monitoring the market for lookalikes has grown considerably. Her somewhat hopeful counterpoint is that AI tools are also making that monitoring easier, creating a situation where the same technology driving the risk is also providing some of the tools to manage it.

Moving IP Awareness Upstream

When the conversation turns to what professional organizations like ADAPT can do, Watal's thinking is specific and structural. She begins with an honest assessment: the trademark system is not well designed for people who don’t already understand it. There is no shortage of guidance documents, explainers, and government resources trying to break down the information barrier, and they are genuinely useful, access to information is not the problem.

The problem, as she sees it, is timing. Businesses encounter IP decisions far too late in their development process, often after they have already invested significantly in a brand they may not be able to protect or use freely. The fix is redesigning the entry experience so that the prompt to think about trademark protection arrives much earlier, at the exact moments when businesses are making other foundational decisions.

"When you are registering a business name, that is when the prompt should arrive: have you thought about trademark registration? When you are setting up your accounting software, that is when you also need to be thinking about brand protection." The goal is to move IP awareness upstream into those critical early decision moments, before the damage has already been done.

This is also the animating idea behind the platform she is currently building, which is designed to make the trademark entry experience more user-friendly for the people who interact with brands every day: marketers, brand developers, and business owners who are not IP practitioners but who are making decisions with IP consequences.

The Future of Trademark Law in an AI World

Looking ahead, Watal makes one prediction with particular confidence: non-traditional trademarks, including color marks and other marks beyond standard words and logos, which have historically been niche and difficult to register, are going to become significantly more important. As AI homogenizes visual branding, the marks that are hardest to algorithmically replicate will become more valuable. Examination practices for those types of marks, she argues, will need to evolve to handle both the volume and the more sophisticated standards required.

The longer-term question she finds genuinely fascinating is what happens to trademark law when agentic AI, rather than a human consumer, is the one making purchasing decisions. The entire framework for assessing consumer confusion is built around how a human perceives and responds to brands: the look, the sound, the feel of a mark. An AI agent does not perceive brands that way. It reads metadata, keyword rankings, and recommendation parameters.

"If agentic AI is the one making the purchase, what is the threshold for confusion? Maybe we will need two thresholds, because humans will still be in place. But if it is an AI agent doing the transaction, maybe a different threshold applies entirely." These are questions the law has not yet been forced to fully answer, but Watal believes they are coming faster than most practitioners expect.

Giving Back What Was Not Given to Her

Watal is clear-eyed about what her own entry into the profession looked like. She had no mentors waiting for her when she arrived. Navigating the legal field without guidance can be enormously challenging. Watal had to find mentors and sponsors for herself, which is not easy in a profession where time is scarce, competition is high, and there are very few female leaders with a similar technical or cultural background. Anything she can do to make that journey easier for the next generation, she wants to do.

That commitment explains her involvement in multiple industry bodies focused on early-career support, her role building up the ChIPs Network Australia New Zealand chapter, and her interest in engaging with ADAPT's work. She sees a direct line between what ADAPT is trying to do, increasing awareness of and access to IP systems earlier and more broadly, and the kind of structural change that actually shifts who participates in the profession.

The teenager who watched her mother's lawyer refuse a fee because some cases are worth taking on for their own sake has never quite let go of that image. Law, at its best, levels the field. Watal's work, in the trademark system and beyond it, is a sustained argument that the IP system should do the same.

A warm thank you to Ashley Cheung of Virtual Patent Gateway, who thoughtfully made the introduction and shared the episode.

Sarah Foley

Founder, Foley IP Law, PLLC

ADAPT Communications Team