Life sciences legal work is generally booming. But what about life sciences patent litigation? And if you are interested in this career path, what type of technical background is required? The answers may surprise you and open up new opportunities.

 

More on Priya Patel and Derek Walter.

 

SPEAKERS

Derek Walter, Wayne Stacy, Priya Patel

 

Wayne Stacy  00:01

Welcome, everyone to the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology's Career Series podcast. I'm Wayne Stacy, the Executive Director for BCLT. Today, we are talking about the types of litigation work needed by Life Sciences companies, and in particular, talking about what patent litigation looks like for Life Sciences companies. So I'm here with two attorneys from Weil that are both leading experts in patent litigation, we have Derek Walter, he's a patent partner focusing on patent litigation in both the biological and chemical areas. And then we have Priya Patel. She's an attorney in the patent litigation practice also focusing on the life sciences areas. So thank you both for joining us today and describing a little bit about your practice.

 

Derek Walter  00:49

Thank you.

 

Wayne Stacy  00:51

So I want to start with, you know, the life sciences, patent litigation is a very specialized practice. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do day to day and what your practice would look like?

 

Derek Walter  01:04

Sure, I'll go ahead and start. day to day what you do as a patent litigator, it changes over the course of your career. When you start out as an early associate, you do a lot of case building, you do a lot of analyzing prior art that might relate to patents in the case, you do a lot of analysis of the products that are an issue in the case, you do spend some time looking at documents that might be relevant to the case, you draft a lot of briefs you do spend some time doing discovery, drafting, interrogatory, ease, responding to discovery requests, drafting requests for admissions, you do a lot of that fairly often. And as you get more senior, you know, the tasks change a little bit, you know, you end up being more of a manager, you spend a lot more time doing a lot more emails with clients and other associates that are part of your team, you take on some more executive advanced skills, you know, you might spend a lot more time doing depositions, you probably spend a lot more time arguing in court. You spend less time doing kind of the work that you did early on. But, you know, those are the main tasks that go on. And on a day to day basis for patent litigator Priya might have a slightly different take on it. But that's my take.

 

Priya Patel  02:26

No, I agree. I think it's coming from as I'm a mid level associate at this point. So I'm kind of seeing that transition happen slowly. So definitely, when I was more junior associate, it was more research assignments, building, the record generally as Derek's talking about and I continue to do that sort of thing. But now it's more drafting responsibilities. Specifically, I also, I started out Weil and then I left to go to a clerkship and then I returned to Weil and I think since my return, I've been used often to draft briefs and memos, things like that, which I thoroughly enjoy. So I hope that continues even as I get senior, but my day to day sounds a lot like what Derek described.

 

Derek Walter  03:07

One thing I think is worth adding on this point that I think is true of patent litigation, regardless of what stage you're at i