PACE SETTERS: Silicon Valley lawyers Steve Carlson and Jeff Homrig ’01 co-teach a groundbreaking new patent litigation course.
JIM BLOCK
No Disputing This Patent Innovation With two leading patent litigators as their guides, Berkeley Law students are gaining a front-row view into how patents are challenged after they have been granted. Called post-grant review, the trial proceeding is the focus of the school’s Patent Litigation II course. The groundbreaking class—apparently the nation’s first to focus on the relatively nascent Patent
Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)—is taught by Steve Carlson of Robins Kaplan and Jeff Homrig ’01 of Latham & Watkins. Both coauthored, with Berkeley Law Professor Peter Menell and others, a seminal book that judges often use to navigate patent cases. The instructors’ goal? “To help students tackle realworld disputes in exactly the same way we do in
practice—thinking through a client’s needs, working with expert witnesses, presenting to judges, all in a team setting,” Homrig says. Students in their fall course worked on a mock challenge to an actual barcode patent asserted in more than 100 lawsuits over the past three years. They met with a Silicon Valley IP in-house counsel and expert witness, drafted petitions
for the parties’ review, and made oral arguments before PTAB judges. “It’s a great experience for the students to argue these cases in real life, and to get very direct and pointed feedback from the judges,” Carlson says. Students also investigated patent cases before the International Trade Commission, including emerging intersections between that body and PTAB. Makoto Tsunozaki ’19 lauds the new course, saying he gained “a better appreciation of the 12-dimensional chess that happens under the surface in an IP dispute.” —Wendy Witherspoon
NEW HEIGHTS IN DIVERSITY Fifteen Berkeley Law students were named 2017 California Bar Foundation Diversity Scholars. That total is 10 more than any other law school and onefourth of the overall recipients. The scholarships support California law students to help increase diversity in the legal profession. “When I was nine, my parents were
swindled out of what little money we had by someone who would allegedly guide us through the citizenship process,” recipient Su Myint ’20 recalls. “My experiences taught me that where the law has been used to commit harm, it must be leveraged to correct harm. ... Attorneys have the power to give access to those who need it most.”
Berkeley Law’s other honorees are Martha Cardenas, Saxon CropperSykes, Lana El-Farra, Chante Eliaszadeh, Nestor Cerda Gonzalez, Cristina Mora, Bill Nguyen, Cremeithius Riggins, Anna Rodriguez, Patrick Rubalcava, Seema Rupani, Dru Spiller, Joanna Torres, and Esther Yang. —Andrew Cohen
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