One of Michael Simons’ earliest memories is of seeing his father holding a pair of scissors that he had just pulled out of a pot of boiling water.

Simons, an IP litigator now serving as partner-in-charge of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld’s office in Austin, Texas, recalls his father walking past him, scissors in hand, into an adjacent room in the family’s two-room log cabin to cut the umbilical cord of his sister, whom his mother had just given birth to in their home.