Law, Science, and Sex (Dean)

A post today on Out of the Jungle, a legal information blog, has me thinking.  It refers to this  AP article in the Boston Globe (and elsewhere) regarding the growing numbers of students arriving  at law school after a detour through the sciences. Their obvious target is patent law, the practice of which requires prospective attorneys to take a supplemental bar exam to demonstrate their scientific competencies. The article features a former MIT doctoral student, Loretta Weathers, who tired of "the solitude of the lab" and sought a "sexier" career in technology law. So now she's a patent attorney, but the article cites a copyright infringement case as an instance of how she has brought her scientific expertise to bear on the law.  Huh?

There are indeed copyright cases in which "experts" are called to testify to the effect that an alleged infringing work B must have been a copy of the purportedly infringed work A owing to its uncannily "striking similarity" to A.  William Patry, a copyright expert who recently published a multi-volume treatise on the vast topic, replete with historical references to late-Renaissance Venice, often bemoans the use of such experts, as he has recently here on his blog. This post by Patry involves armies of experts, one who sets out to prove one musician copied another's work through Fast Fourier Transform spectral analysis.  Whatever. In any case, that's not the sort of scientific expertise Ms. Weathers evidently wielded in the case described in the Globe. That case, William A. Graham Co. v. Haughey, required her to "put her science and math skills to work behind the scenes, building a database of more than 1,000 acts of alleged infringement." This is decidedly unsexy and not particularly scientific work, I'm afraid. It looks more like ordinary document review, the tedious poring over of files relegated to green associates at big firms.

What's more, the significance of the case as reported by the Globe is its huge jury verdict. The verdict favored—are we surprised?—an insurance company whose sales presentations were copied by a competitor over fourteen years. This is getting less sexy, and I'm thinking I might want to start reading up on Fast Fourier Transform spectral analysis right about now for some excitement. The money to be made as an attorney may not have been Ms. Weathers' motivation, as she confides, but the nineteen million bucks undoubtedly motivates the story. On March 29, however, a court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania gave the insurance company a cold shower when it held that the statute of limitations had expired for the most of the period of alleged infringement. Therefore, most of the damages are barred. So much for the rigors of database construction.

And so a curiosity of a story about the interplay of science, law, professional education, and making a living, turns out to have distorted or left out some important details. To some extent, the story perpetuates the mythology of excessive jury verdicts, but it also depicts a flatly unrealistic notion of the nature of legal work. I imagine Ms. Weathers had much more to say of value about her former MIT lab work and the comparatively stimulating life of an intellectual property lawyer, but it either went unspoken or was edited from the final copy. Still, how is "building a database of more than 1,000 acts of alleged infringement" (of the  internal literature of an insurance company!) all that different from sitting "in front of a computer terminal going over graphs"? Ms. Weathers explains, "You do make quite a bit more money than you do as a researcher or scientist."

Comments

[Sujatha]

The charms of database construction and word parsing aside, I'm sure that Ms.Weathers made in the ballpark of $500/- an hour. Why not spend a few hundred hours creating a database, if it's going to get you that kind of money, as opposed to slogging with graphs and statistics in a plasma physics lab that pays you about $20-$30/- an hour. Then you can take a long Hawaiian vacation and contemplate all the FFTs you like with a pina colada beneath palm trees swaying in the breeze ;-)

[Ruchira Paul]

I once asked my son (a prospective Ph.D. in molecular biology / biophysics) if he would consider following in his sister's footsteps and attend law school. I laid out a sexy scenario similar to what Ms Weathers describes as her own motivation. My son, who eschewed med school for academia was not seduced - even the differential in the per hour remuneration did not do the trick. But then, I am talking about a thoroughly capable young man who would probably have been quite happy playing in a jazz band in some smoky bar.

[m]

Yes, nothing says "sexy" like the work of a patent attorney. I've bought every single "Patent Attorneys Gone Wild" video in the series. Each one features a salacious hour or so of naughty revisions to the previous motion to dismiss the aforementioned waver of consent filed retroactive to the formerly agreed-upon non-binding selection of the first party. Hot!

[Dean C. Rowan]

Hey, m, I've yet to finish my morning coffee and you've got me all flustered. I thought those videos featured binding selections of all parties, if you get my drift...

[Meet Your Asian Soulmate]

Nice content.

Keep up the great work. Kudos!