Engineered for Law

Growing up in Annapolis, Maryland, Todd Basile was captivated by the Blue Angels demonstration team that soared high above the U.S. Naval Academy next to his family’s home each year.

“I wanted to actually be a combat aviator, but my eyes are terrible. It turned into, ‘If you can’t fly ‘em, build ‘em,’” says Basile, who went on to study engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

In the summer of 2005, Basile interned at Smiths Aerospace, now GE Aviation, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There, he designed and tested “flying robots”—U.S. Navy drones. It was his first interaction with the unmanned craft, and he was hooked.

“It was really the automation aspect,” says Basile. “Aircraft have been around since the early 1900s, and they’ve always been manually flown and controlled. The idea of having these things have a brain inside of them that thinks like us and knows what to do and knows what’s going on around it—that’s honestly what got me into it.”

After graduating in 2006, Basile moved to Dallas to work as a flight technology engineer at Bell Helicopter, where he helped build the Bell 525 Relentless, one of the company’s largest choppers, from scratch. Four years into the job, however, change was on the horizon. The financial crisis had taken a toll on Bell, and employees were being laid off. And Basile knew that his experience being part of a ground-up aerodynamics team wouldn’t repeat itself—at least not any time soon. “I absolutely loved working on the Relentless helicopter; it was phenomenal,” he says. “But I knew there’d be an end to it.”

Basile knew that, if he wasn’t laid off, he’d most likely be assigned to a smaller project. “That didn’t appeal to me as much as this initial sizing and performance work, where you get to work with all different disciplines within engineering—as well as the business and marketing side,” he adds. “I quickly came to realize that’s what I enjoyed.”

Though he considered getting an MBA, Basile ultimately decided to follow in the footsteps of his dad and sister, both of whom hold law degrees. He started the four-year night program at SMU Dedman School of Law while working full time at Bell, which required Basile to leave work early four days a week while still completing his demanding workload. “I was kind of a masochist, when I look back on it,” he laughs.

“I absolutely loved working on the Relentless helicopter; it was phenomenal. But I knew there’d be an end to it.”

Then he had an epiphany: He could create a software program to automate certain processes in 45 minutes that would otherwise take two or three days, allowing breathing room in his grueling schedule. “My job was to establish a baseline for what the aircraft is going to look like physically. We would have to take those performance requirements and apply processes to figure out the physical parameters of the aircraft,” Basile says. “I basically automated the established workflows, and integrated all the tools together, so that the process would largely carry itself out instead of having to do it manually.”

Basille earned his J.D. in 2011, then cut his teeth for two years doing intellectual property work at Klemchuk before joining Greenberg Traurig in 2014. At the Dallas office, he advises companies and investors on technology transactions and patents—work made easier thanks to his engineering days.

“The number one thing for an engineer is figuring out how to take a very complex problem and breaking it down into a series of simpler problems that you can actually get your head around and solve,” he says. “It’s extremely similar to law. … Nowadays, part of my job is to understand someone else’s technology and break it down into a simple explanation so that we can teach an educated examiner at the patent office what’s going on and why we’re different from the other folks.”

Drone Zone

Todd Basile feeds his passion for drones as co-leader of Greenberg’s Robotics & Autonomous Technologies group. He also recently got his own remote pilot license to better understand the rules and regulations governing drone operation. “I’ve never really been one to do things the way they’ve always been done,” he says. “The ability to innovate in a fresh area like this is one of the most attractive aspects of it.”