IP community eagerly awaiting Federal Circuit visit
Denver Business Journal
Heather Draper, Reporter
September 28, 2012 — The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will be hearing oral arguments in Denver Oct. 2-4 — another milestone for the state’s intellectual property (IP) legal community, which helped land a satellite patent office here earlier this year.
The Washington, D.C.-based Federal Circuit Court each year travels to a different city to hear cases and host educational seminars, and this is the court’s first visit to Colorado.
The Federal Circuit — which hears appeals related to trademarks, patents and international trade, among other things — is unique among the courts of appeal in that it’s the only one that has its jurisdiction based on subject matter rather than geographic location.
The Federal Circuit will hear oral arguments Oct. 2 in downtown Denver at the Alfred A. Arraj U.S. Courthouse and the Byron Rogers Federal Building, at the University of Colorado Law School on Oct. 3 and the University of Denver Sturm College of Law on Oct. 4. The judges also will attend public events, including a formal dinner for members of the IP community at the History Colorado Center.
“It’s going to be a very exciting week for the IP community, an education for our students and a great opportunity for district court and federal circuit judges to get together and talk,” said patent attorney Michael Drapkin, a partner at Denver-based Holland & Hart LLP. “It plays into the whole momentum we have in Colorado, that something special is happening in the IP community.”
Intellectual property law covers patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and celebrities’ rights to protect their image.
Drapkin was instrumental in getting the Federal Circuit to come to the state, and also played a role in getting a satellite patent office here, which is forecast to have a $439 million combined economic impact on the state in the next five years.
In July, the U.S. Commerce Department chose Denver as one of three metro areas to be awarded a satellite branch of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, along with Dallas and San Jose, Calif.
“What all of these things are showing … is that people around the country are recognizing that this area is a hub for entrepreneurial and innovation activity,” Drapkin said.
IP attorney George Matava, of counsel at the Denver office of Lathrop & Gage LLP, said he and Drapkin asked the Federal Circuit judges who traveled to Denver in April 2011 to participate in the area’s new IP Inn of Court if the court would travel here for its next city visit.
The Inn — based on the Inns of Court created in England centuries ago to oversee the legal profession — brought together a panel of judges and about 130 intellectual property lawyers, law professors and students from DU and CU to discuss issues facing IP law practices today.
Within a few weeks of submitting a formal proposal to the judges last year, Drapkin and Matava were informed by circuit executives that the court would be hearing arguments in Denver this year.
“The court’s interest in sitting in Colorado this fall is a product of the enthusiasm and quality of the IP community here in Colorado,” Matava said. “Within a short year, we were able to assemble a vibrant IP Inn of Court, and the IP section of the Colorado Bar is and has been active for the last 15 years or so. It has been very much a joint effort by many firms and individuals.”
Bernard Chao, assistant professor at the Sturm College of Law, said the ability of his patent-law students to sit in on the court’s oral arguments will be a “great learning opportunity for them. We don’t get to hear cutting-edge arguments used in a court of appeals on a daily basis.”
At DU, the Federal Circuit is scheduled to hear oral arguments in four cases, including a patent case involving social networking and user review site Yelp Inc. (NYSE: YELP), based in San Francisco.
“My class was required to write a short memo to the public — a one-page summary of the case at the hearings itself,” Chao said. “They’ll also be writing a recommended decision after the oral argument, based on the briefing and the oral argument.”
The attorneys involved in the oral arguments will do a question-and-answer session with the students after the hearing. Some DU students also will get the chance to have lunch with the judges and discuss how they make decisions, he said.
CU law students will have a similar experience the next day, said Harry Surden, associate professor of law at CU.
“The students will get to watch the oral arguments, and it will be really interesting for students to see what we read about in class come to life,” Surden said. “It will humanize the process when they get to see some faces attached to the judges they read about.”
