We had our annual Christmas party a couple of days ago. True to the holiday spirit, we had dinner at a local Mexican restaurant (yum!) and then went bowling. Cathi won the first round of bowling, and Karen won the second. Lest you think that we chose bowling because we’re both ringers, I’ll let you know that neither winning score was higher than 110. Maybe next year we’ll have some stiffer competition from our students!

Merry Christmas!

From left to right:
Back row: Josh Lee, Travis Howell, Karen Deak, David Kleycinger, Joseph Handen
Front row: Rose Moller-Jacobs, Cathi Kennedy, Marcy Kreimier, Elaine Seasley

On Friday, the MSPL went to Chicago. We spent the afternoon in the city — the students had a couple of hours to explore, and then we heard from Chris Moreno about patent prosecution.

Chris is a shareholder at VedderPrice in Chicago, where his practice focuses on patent prosecution. He gave our students an overview of the process and also provided lots of tips he’s learned from about 20 years on the job. It’s always a delight to have Chris provide this lecture at this time of the year! Thanks Chris!

photo by MSPL student Beau Horner

It’s now exam week, and our MSPL students are mostly done with their end-of-semester presentations. These presentations are a major checkpoint in the program, in which MSPL students defend what they’ve accomplished so far.

For fall semester, our students’ end goal is to write a set of patentable claims. To do that, they learn about a completely new technology from a faculty inventor here at Notre Dame. Then they perform a patentability search in PATL 60111 (taught by Ron Kaminecki this year). Finally, they craft a claimset in their Capstone classes (PATL 60301, which I teach). These tasks are all things patent agents do on a daily basis — and are not easy tasks, for sure!

Our students turn in the results of all of this work in a single document, and then put together a set of slides that they use to give a talk describing their findings. The students present to me, the faculty inventor, and the representative from Notre Dame’s Office of Technology Transfer who handles that technology.

As I said at the top, almost everyone has finished their presentations by now — and everyone has done a fantastic job! It’s been very exciting to watch everyone grow and learn SO MUCH over the course of a single semester. Congratulations to everyone!

At the end of November, the Law School officially launched the new Chicago space. We hosted about 200 Chicago-area legal professionals. Of especial interest to the MSPL, several of last year’s patent attorney mentors joined us, as well as some new friends.

Keith Jarosik and Mark Galis from Greenberg Traurig were there. Keith mentored a MSPL student. Also, Tom Donovan — another of our mentors– was there, pictured below with David Murphy (director of the ESTEEM program here at Notre Dame) and Sunny Shah (also from ESTEEM).

A more recent acquaintance who was in attendance was Brian Goddard, who is at Cardinal IP. Also Barry Irwin, who is a patent litigator, and an old friend, was at the Launch Party, with his wife Ursula.