By Gwyneth K. Shaw
It doesn’t take long for recent UC Berkeley Law grads to climb the ranks and make a meaningful impact early in their wide-ranging careers. We periodically highlight standout alums who are shining across various practice areas in profiles that amplify what drew them to their current work, what they enjoy most about it, and their path to success.
Allyson “Al” Malecha ’24 thought she had her career trajectory all figured out: A pre-med track as an undergrad, then a master’s degree in cancer biology in France before starting medical school.
Just a few weeks in, a serious health complication forced her to pause her studies. Living at home with her parents during the COVID-19 pandemic, she realized being a practicing physician wasn’t what she wanted.
“I liked the health angle and I liked the science, but what I really liked about it was way more policy-related,” she says. “It was more bioethics, health economics, policy, and law.”
A friend connected Malecha with someone at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who had both a law degree and a Ph.D. in medical history. He pointed her toward law school, explaining that a J.D. would enable working across a variety of jobs, given her research interests — and that she didn’t need to decide the details right away.
UC Berkeley Law topped Malecha’s list because of its long-running reputation as a haven for technology and intellectual property law. Her arrival coincided with the debut of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology’s (BCLT) Life Sciences Law & Policy Center — a hub for practitioners, students, scholars, and life sciences entrepreneurs exploring issues including drug pricing, current regulatory challenges, and how AI should be responsibly incorporated into life sciences applications and companies.
Varied interests
It was the perfect fit, allowing Malecha to continue to explore her research interests while absorbing the legal framework that governs how scientific advances are regulated and monetized.
Now an associate in the intellectual property group in Haynes Boone’s San Francisco office, Malecha says her detour from medical school led her to just the right place.
“One thing I like a lot about my firm is that I’ve been able to do a lot of different types of work,” she says. “I’m able to do patent prosecution and trials, I’m working on some trademark litigation, and as a summer associate I did some work in regulatory compliance.
“Especially as someone early in my career who has a lot of interests, it’s been nice to work on a variety of things, so I can figure out what my niche looks like in a practicing capacity.”
Her professional trajectory reflects the wide range of issues and subjects she took on as a student. Malecha served on the executive committees of two of UC Berkeley Law’s student-run journals, the California Law Review and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, and worked as a research assistant on several projects for the Life Sciences Law & Policy Center.
That included exploring the circumstances leading up to the FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court last year, which involved citizen petitions submitted to the Food and Drug Administration that received belated responses. Malecha collaborated on an article about it with life sciences center Director Allison Schmitt ’15 which will be published in the Harvard Journal on Legislation.
Interested in digging deeper into the FDA’s citizen petition process, Schmitt and Malecha recruited undergraduate data science students to gather empirical data about the petitions and create a public database. Malecha’s experience in Schmitt’s two-semester Life Sciences & Innovation Workshop — taught with renowned Professor Peter S. Menell — sparked another major project.
“The focus of the course was mainly the intellectual property background of a variety of topics, so I was researching some of these artificial intelligence technologies for fertility medicine,” Malecha says. “What I found interesting about it was kind of the way that it was sort of the Wild West in terms of regulation, because you have a ton of different policies that would impact it.”
Threading the needle
For example, she says, the National Institutes of Health have no ethical guidelines for embryonic research, and the FDA is subject to a ban on research on embryos. As AI-based procedures race forward, Malecha adds, sorting out where the technology can help and where it’s poorly suited is tricky.
“You see things like radiology, where using AI to help determine, for example, a hairline fracture to a bone, I could see how that would be useful. Or where you have machine learning-type things that can help predict a cardiac event. Those are data-in, data-out, and they make clear sense,” she says. “But when your goal is to pick the best embryo, and we don’t even know what ‘the best’ means, and there aren’t clear criteria laid out anywhere, that’s really hard.”
Schmitt suggested Malecha speak with Professor Osagie K. Osasogie, who holds a joint appointment at the law school and UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and specializes in bioethics. He helped her develop her interest into a full-blown project, “From Algorithms to Embryos: How AI is Changing Assisted Reproduction,” which was released as a white paper in January by UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute.
Malecha’s research interests didn’t stop there. After taking Wine Law with Lecturer Richard Mendelson, she co-wrote a textbook chapter with him. And her article “No Claim, No Gain: The Unclaimed Property Solution to Undistributed Class Action Awards,” sparked by a comment in her Consumer Protection Law course, has just been published in the California Law Review.
Her research arc not only engaged her but impacted where she’s headed in her legal career.
“I was really happy that I had the opportunity to do that in law school, especially because for a lot of that time, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do career-wise,” Malecha says. “But I knew that I loved research, and while my interests are pretty broad, they all have a health and life sciences underpinning.”
Malecha’s law school experience also helped smooth her transition into practice — where she’s still exploring new elements. It’s definitely a learning curve, but she’s enjoying her work prosecuting patents in international cases and understanding the different ways that various countries regulate patents and treat therapeutics.
“I think my research background and my desire to kind of find an answer helps. I’ve tried to bring a data-processing and large-scale research approach to my practice,” she says. “That’s an interesting kind of skill set that I’ve been testing out as an associate.”