What do you do?

wilkxus said:

Might I inquire if it is anything juicy? Not asking for details, wondering if it is just because of boredom without any courtroom action or perhaps the case is an interesting one in a technical sense?

Also on a related note thinking of interesting cases, are there any nice journals specifically related to and covering IP related law you might recommend?

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Trials in the kinds of cases we work are relatively rare because the amounts at stake are potentially tens to hundreds of millions, and the companies don't want to get blown out either way. Most of the time the clients are ideological they just want to work out a financial settlement and get back to business.

We don't lack for courtroom action, it's just mostly discovery disputes, summary judgment and the associated motion practice. Getting to pick a jury in a patent case and argue the case will be fun, even though I won't be doing it the senior partners will. I've only seen two patent trials in my career even though I've worked probably 100+ cases...

Cad said:

Trials in the kinds of cases we work are relatively rare because the amounts at stake are potentially tens to hundreds of millions, and the companies don't want to get blown out either way. Most of the time the clients are ideological they just want to work out a financial settlement and get back to business.

We don't lack for courtroom action, it's just mostly discovery disputes, summary judgment and the associated motion practice. Getting to pick a jury in a patent case and argue the case will be fun, even though I won't be doing it the senior partners will. I've only seen two patent trials in my career even though I've worked probably 100+ cases...

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Very interesting thank you, I thought trials were much more frequent. 100+ cases, that is quite a low ratio then.

Also quite a big change and quite unusual to have both experiences (IT and law).
How does this work compare interest wise compared to your IT & technical development work before?
Do you miss the hands on and feeling of reward/satisfaction of getting stuff to work, hands on?

Basicually just curious about where the *high* and *flow* feeling might be found in Law coming to it from a start in IT.

For my part, I get my IP news blurbs from technical sites and even though that aspect (legal/patent side of IT industry) I find incredibly interesting, I cannot imagine giving up that *high* you get in R&D: It is so nice and easy to get into a nice FLOW! It is an easy fix I could not give up easily.

Only downside for me in the past has been that *addiction* to flow has at times made me more susceptible ( when was younger) to exploitation from employers who are always incredibly HAPPY to have someone working *insane* hours AND having fun lol....

I dunno how to answer that really, the work environment and the work itself are so different it's hard to compare. The most assembled product I put together now are briefs, which can take 20-60 hours to put together depending on the length/research involved. I often get to go argue these to the judge who then writes an opinion on that issue. It's pretty gratifying to see them agree with your reasoning.

I don't have any particular addiction to flow and never got any particular high from software development. I work for money. I get more now.

God damn first years. They've had since Wednesday to work on their sections of this motion, we have to file by midnight tonight and now I'm gonna have to take it over the goal line. These fuckers get paid too much to be this incompetent. At least they appear to have found a bunch of good cases.

Not a patent case.

skrala said:

Ha, my firm's first years make $160k and they're basically glorified document specialists.

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You should check, they probably got raises to $180k like ours did.