Welcome to AccelPro IP Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with David Cain, patent attorney at Hauptman Ham.

Cain is a patent attorney with 39 years of experience in the global IP landscape, specializing in patent preparation, prosecution and portfolio management. He focuses on artificial intelligence, medical devices, robotics, agriculture, cryptography and communication technology.

We talk about strategic patent planning, working with startups, prioritizing IP assets, IP strategy for investors and more.

“If you can identify licenses you want before you start and you can get those licenses, you now own that IP in a sense,” Cain says. 

“That allows you to practice without waiting for someone to come and say – hey, you're infringing. Oh no, we've already sent it to production. What do we do now? Which is a terrible bargaining position to be in.”

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the IP law field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members.

Welcome to AccelPro IP Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Evan Zimmerman, CEO and co-founder of Edge. 

Zimmerman is the co-founder of Edge, a Y-Combinator backed patent assistance platform which helps patent practitioners draft patents and disclosures. He is also founder of venture capital firm Jovono and author of patent blog Nonobvious.

Zimmerman discusses building a patent assistance platform, the patent application process, localization for patent work, the changing role of patents and more.

“Good inputs make good outputs. That's true in the patent world as it is in anything else,” Zimmerman says. 

“Ultimately, what we see is that if you're a patent practitioner you're in the business of making satisfied clients and helping them achieve their business objectives in their innovation through intellectual property.

If we can help you make more satisfied clients, both through a better client experience and better serving the core need that the client has, we’ve fundamentally helped you with your business.”

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the IP law field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members.

Welcome to AccelPro IP Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. This interview is part of our AccelPro Career Tools series, where we explore topics including client relationship management and wellness.

Our host is internationally recognized journalist, author and NPR host Celeste Headlee. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Jonathan Birenbaum, Senior Director at Lateral Link.

Birenbaum is an experienced litigator and recruiter who specializes in the recruitment of partners, councils and associates. He says that the right time to make a lateral move is when you are no longer feeling challenged and rewarded in your current firm, and that it’s worth possibly sacrificing certain work relationships to find a place with the right people, in a location you enjoy.

“You have to really understand where you sit in your firm. You have to do an analysis for yourself and ask yourself what the cost benefits are going to be if you leave. And if the cost is going to be not maintaining the relationships you had at the firm, that can be a major cost for you, but it depends on what kind of firm you're with.”

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the IP law field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members.

Welcome to AccelPro IP Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Pablo Segarra, trademark attorney and founder of SideHustle.Law.

Segarra discusses trademarks from the perspective of an attorney serving a client base of small and part-time businesses and side hustles. 

We talk about Segarra’s transition from NYPD officer to lawyer, going to law school in his thirties, misconceptions small business owners have about trademarks, how lawyers can structure their offerings for the small business market and more.

“Most of the clients that I work with, they're just trying to get off the ground to actually create this business that they have,” Segarra says.

“I definitely recommend that attorneys that want to work with this specific clientele offer flexible pricing models, flat fee services for specific services, maybe lower your monthly retainer or give a specific amount of hours for package deals. I do that often with ideas like a startup package which includes various documents and various templates for them. That's a lower cost when combined.”

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the IP law field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members.

Welcome to AccelPro IP Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Julie Burke, Expert Witness on US Patent Practice and Procedures at IPQuality Pro.

Burke, a former patent scientist and United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) quality assurance specialist, special program examiner and patent examiner, focuses in our conversation on the USPTO’s updated DOCX filing requirements.

We talk about Burke's paper on DOCX filing and rendering errors, DOCX filing requirements and the type of errors IP practitioners may encounter when filing DOCX patent applications in the US.

“Even though all the text is there from the beginning to the end, applicants receive a notice of missing parts with no way to move forward,” Burke says.

“This jams up prosecution for months to come, because it's taking on average 170 days for our sample of applications that have been petitioned for the Patent Office to respond. That's a very lengthy time to have your application stuck on hold in pre-exam with no way to move forward. The error itself is not one created by the applicant, but you have to file the petitions and pay the fees and wait and see if you can get it fixed.”

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the IP law field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members.

Today, we are featuring a discussion with David Bellos and Alex Montagu about the history of copyright protection.

Bellos is a professor at Princeton University with a distinguished background as a translator and biographer. Montagu is a founding Partner of MontaguLaw, P.C., a law firm that focuses primarily on intellectual property law, international commercial transactions and new media commercial and corporate law. The pair recently released a book, Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyright and Wrongs, which goes into great detail on the history of copyright and how it impacts our everyday lives.

“From the beginning, copyright had this tendency to spread, creep, and crawl, and it extended in dribs and drabs from books to engravings to sheet music—sculptures, the visual arts and even textile designs like tea towels in the Calico Printers’ Act. It had a tendency from the start to get bigger and bigger. This started happening long before there was any new media or the internationalization of copyright and the extension of the rights that it conferred, like translation and adaptation. All this precedes the invention of anything that you might call ‘new media,’” Bellos says.

Montagu adds, “In the 17th and 18th century, these issues were debated publicly. It was not an issue that was limited to a niche circle of lawyers and lobbyists behind the scenes, because issues that affected people were debated by philosophers–John Locke, Condorcet in France, people like that. Today, that's not what we're doing. This is very much a niche issue that, if debated at all, is debated in the context of the United States Copyright Office or the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. There are very few people involved. And we argue that this is actually touching everybody, so we want to open up the discussion.”

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the IP law field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members.

Welcome to AccelPro IP Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. This interview is part of our AccelPro Career Tools series, where we explore topics including wellness and client relationship management.

Our host is internationally recognized journalist, author and NPR host Celeste Headlee. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Beth Toth, Principal Coach and Consultant at Consulo Consulting. 

Beth has a long history working in the human facing side of business; starting in HR, she’s moved through recruiting to consulting, and has a comprehensive perspective. She has advised organizations from startups to Fortune 500s, and individuals from entry-level employees to executives.

Beth offers helpful insights on how to best manage difficult situations with clients and accomplish goals even when obstacles emerge. She describes how honesty, shared goals and an openness to others’ mindsets have allowed her to navigate relationships and help her clients move past sticking points.

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the IP law field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members.

Welcome to AccelPro IP Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today, we are featuring a discussion with Jonathan Masur about real world prior art.

Masur, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, specializes in patent law, administrative law, behavioral law and economics and criminal law. In this conversation, we talk about whether an invention is or is not novel, litigation over these issues and more.

“It’s an interesting subject to talk about because the rules for real world prior art in the physical universe are different from the rules for prior art on paper,” Masur says. “They are more complex in a lot of ways and the courts are still trying to work them out in a lot of ways that they are not when it comes to paper prior art.”

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the IP law field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members.

Welcome to AccelPro IP Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Yayoi Shionoiri, Lawyer for the Chris Burden Estate and the Nancy Rubins Studio & Sarah Conley Odenkirk, Partner at Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard LLP.

In this interview, Odenkirk and Shionoiri discuss public art commissions and their overlap with intellectual property law, the public art development process, ways for artists and municipalities to work together and more.

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the IP law field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members.

Welcome to AccelPro IP Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Angela Dunning, partner at Cleary Gottlieb Steen and Hamilton LLP. 

In this interview, Dunning discusses her work in the Naruto v. Slater case, legal questions around authorship and artificial intelligence, class action lawsuits around training data for generative AI, her work on behalf of Midjourney, what the future holds for legal approaches around AI and more. We spoke with Angela in mid-2023 and conducted a follow-up interview in February 2024.

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the IP law field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members.