Orly Lobel attended Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law for he LL.B, Harvard Law School for her LL.M, and Harvard Law School for her S.J.D. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, a teaching fellow at Tel-Aviv University Law School, a law clerk at the Israeli Supreme Court, the Clark Byse Teaching Fellow at Harvard Law School, a Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School, a Visiting Professor at Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law, and has been a Professor of Law at the University of San Diego since 2009. She is the author of Talent Wants to be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free Riding, among numerous other publications, and her research focuses upon innovation policy and intellectual policy.

On the show, Professor Lobel talked about Silicon Valley’s talent wars, the fight to get the best employees and then retain them. In the discussion, she raised the point of the human capital cartel between firms like Google and Apple, an illegal agreement that kept these massive firms from hiring one another’s employees. Her discussion centered on the theme that managers ought to like the flow of talent around different companies, and that this is good for firms and for the economy. It is also important, in her opinion, that firms get better at allowing employees to come up with new ideas themselves and feel that the idea will be welcomed and compensated for as the firm moves forward with it.