Principal Corporate Counsel: Trade Secrets, Copyrights, and AI in IP

Members of the Legal organization at select locations will generally follow a hybrid work model, which includes two days of in-office attendance each week, with limited exceptions.

Meet the Team

At Cisco, the Intellectual Property team sits at the crossroads of technology, business, and law, with insight into an outstanding breadth of innovation spanning networking, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure, collaboration, and observability. We work together inside a legal organization that treats IP as a strategic business asset and are building the institutional frameworks that let Cisco's engineers translate invention into durable protection. AI is changing the terms of that work, including what we can protect, through which legal instruments, and with what level of certainty. This role is dedicated to managing the new categories of exposure—copyright, trade secrets, vendor contracting, and prosecution validity—that AI introduces.

Responsibilities

• Lead the IP aspects of Cisco's AI legal and governance strategies, including policies, documentation standards, and invention workflows to determine whether AI-assisted innovations produce enforceable patents or evidentiary gaps.
• Update mentorship on human conception documentation and partner cross-functionally with other legal subject-matter experts to establish approved-tool standards for IP protection and risk mitigation in AI-driven invention development.
• Evolve and run Cisco's copyright program in the AI era, addressing both traditional functions and emerging questions such as ownership of AI-generated technical and creative output, human authorship record structuring, and downstream copyright liability from foundation model training data in Cisco's vendor stack.
• Evolve and run Cisco's trade secret program as an enterprise function, including identifying methodologies and systems to classify proprietary assets, detailing reasonable protective measures, and crafting legal and technical governance to ensure defensibility in litigation.
• Advise the patent team on AI-specific patent strategies, including AI-assisted inventorship documentation and inter-jurisdictional differences affecting patent protection.
• Audit and manage AI vendor IP exposure with the AI legal team, serving as the critical IP issue point for AI-related agreements and establishing contractual standards for AI tool deployment.
• Serve as the IP team's legal intelligence function on AI, translating developments from the USPTO, Copyright Office, Federal Circuit, and legislative bodies into timely, executive-ready mentorship.

Requirements

• J.D. from an accredited law school with active bar membership in at least one U.S. jurisdiction.
• Minimum of 10 years of intellectual property legal experience, with at least 5 years focused on technology-based IP matters, including copyright ownership and/or trade secret protection.
• Deep working knowledge of copyright and/or trade secrets as applied to AI-generated works.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience advising on copyright licensing for software and/or AI-generated content at scale, including SaaS platform output, API-delivered content, or enterprise software products where the distinction between human-authored and AI-generated deliverables is legally material.
• International IP exposure relevant to AI (e.g., working knowledge of EU AI Act transparency obligations and their tension with trade secret protection).
• Experience structuring or leading a trade secret litigation matter or pre-litigation investigation, including familiarity with trade secret identification for discovery, reasonable-measures evidence, and causal nexus standards in AI-related misappropriation claims.
• Track record of credible, concise executive communication on IP risk; ability to translate unsettled legal doctrine into business-relevant mentorship without over-hedging or misrepresenting the state of the law.

About Cisco

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era—and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across their entire digital footprint. Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.

Pay

The starting salary range for this position is $202,200.00 to $256,000.00 for new hires in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation, equity, or benefits. Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. Below are the full salary ranges for specific locations:

• New York City Metro Area: $221,300.00 - $331,000.00
• Non-Metro New York State & Washington State: $202,200.00 - $294,400.00

For quota-based sales roles, the ranges provided include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k) plan with Cisco matching contribution.
• Paid parental leave, short- and long-term disability coverage, and basic life insurance.
• Restricted stock units (RSUs) that vest over time, subject to continued employment.
• Paid time off, including:
  • 10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees.
  • 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday.
  • Paid year-end holiday shutdown.
  • 4 paid days off for personal wellness.
  • Non-exempt employees: 16 days of paid vacation per full calendar year, accrued at 4.92 hours per pay period.
  • Exempt employees: Flexible vacation time off with no defined limit (subject to business needs).
  • 80 hours of sick time provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, with up to 80 hours carried forward annually.
  • Additional paid time off for critical or emergency family issues.
  • Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year for volunteering.
• Annual bonuses for non-sales roles, subject to Cisco’s policies.
• For sales roles: Performance-based incentive pay split between quota and non-quota components, with no minimum threshold for payout.