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Meet John Buchanan, Director of Global Communications at O'Melveny & Myers LLP
Features
Two firms from the MLF 50 are standouts in the area of client-centric marketing activities and for different reasons. <br>The first, Winston & Strawn, led by Director of Business Development and Marketing Partner Barbara C. Sessions, embarked on an overall visibility campaign with an overarching theme on client-focused service and they did this via their Web site.<br>No less outstanding in harnessing client-centric based marketing is the firm of Holland & Hart. In 2006, the marketing department, led by Director of Marketing Mark Beese (or as he refers to himself the 'Marketing Guy') engaged in several new initiatives; each of them intimately involving the firm's clients, with the goal of deepening Holland & Hart's relationship with current clients and attracting new ones. The firm's advertising campaign has evolved to highlight innovative and successful clients as part of the Holland & Hart trademark western wilderness.
Features
The difference between winning and losing a billion dollars in a patent case can be as seemingly insignificant as a date. But when that date is a disputed priority date for the asserted patent, it is not only potentially outcome-determinative, but also quite difficult to establish. A priority dispute often arises in patent litigation when the accused infringer asserts a prior art reference that predates the filing of the application for the patent-in-suit, but postdates the time at which work on the patented invention began. Faced with this art, the patentee has two options: fight the prior art on the patent's merits, potentially limiting the scope of the claims and impairing its infringement arguments, or 'swear behind' the reference by establishing a pre-filing priority date before the asserted reference, and thus eliminate the reference as prior art. In most cases, swearing behind the reference is the better option because it does not typically affect the substance of the claims. By swearing behind the reference, the patentee does not have to draw distinctions between the reference and the claims that can be used against it later in claim construction or in the context of a noninfringement argument. But establishing an earlier priority date can be tricky because it generally requires evidence, including corroborating documents, showing that the invention was reduced to practice before the inventor filed the patent application.
As 2006 comes to a close ' and in keeping with tradition ' we will take a look back at the topics that defined this past year in the areas of marketing, business development, media and, most recently, management issues.
The value to U.S. practitioners of provisional patent applications is still being uncovered, even though they arrived more than 10 years ago and were substantially improved more than 7 years ago by allowing convertibility to non-provisional patent applications.
All across America, citizens were recently asked to choose between two popular candidates. Not Democrat versus Republican, but Firefox 2.0 versus Internet Explorer 7. With major upgrades released for each of these popular Web browsers, the question for netizens is: 'Which should get my vote?'
The value of a good lawyer is not proven in redrafting maps of familiar ports, but rather it is secured by successfully navigating uncharted waters. Sophisticated purchasers of legal services understand this, and they expect today's lawyers to quickly locate, validate, update and utilize past work product where it is prudent to do so. Forward thinking firms now utilize tools to effectively mine their own documents, but I was recently introduced to an amazing concept: Why stop looking for precedent documents at your firewall, if you can just as easily access documents filed by your competitor? The ramifications of this new concept are astounding.
Electronic discovery software is on the move. Programs are improving, new players have been entering the market and consolidation is rampant.
Features
There are a variety of products and tools available for comparing Microsoft Word documents. Within native Word, edits can be tracked using the track changes tool that, by default, marks document edits with an underline as text is inserted and a line through text that is deleted. However, many firms have a policy against using the track changes feature because of concerns about metadata. As each edit is marked, Word also notes the author of the change and the date and time the change was made. Additionally, a record of the last 10 authors is embedded in the document as well. However, metadata scrubbers have eliminated this issue by allowing users to retain tracked changes but eradicate the metadata they contain as well as remove the complete author history. Tracking changes is finding new popularity in law firms because of the metadata cleaning capability.
Features
Knowledge management (KM) as a discipline is simultaneously relatively new and very old. We, as people, want to share ' or rather we acknowledge that it is vital; societies were built on the interchange of information and knowledge. Historically, apprenticeships and livery companies ensured the transfer of tacit expert knowledge. We still do this in our personal lives; we share happily with friends and strangers. Yet at work, and particularly in professions, the lack of sharing and capture of contextualized knowledge is so extreme that an entire industry has arisen to help us relearn and apply what should be natural to us.