Berkeley Center for Law and Technology Info Session

all right so i'll just give everyone about 20 seconds to join and then we will go ahead and get started all right so thank you everybody for joining us this afternoon or evening depending on where you are my name is chelsea hackett and i'm the admissions outreach coordinator in the jd admissions office and i'm joined here today by wayne stacey who's the executive director of berkeley's center for lawn technology or bclt as we call it for short and alison schmidt who's the director of the life sciences program within bclt um so in terms of ground rules for today's session uh wayne will be sharing his screen and presenting for most of it and then there will be an opportunity for questions and answers um i'll also keep the q a feature on so if you have any questions that you want to ask either of these panelists during the session you can go ahead and chat that into the q a feature rather than the chat i'm also recording the session so if you miss anything this will live up on our website after the fact um but with that i will go ahead and stop talking and turn things over to wayne and allison so welcome everyone the the goal here today is to share information so please feel free to ask questions we'll sort through them and try to get them all answered for you between ali and me hopefully we can answer them all and if there are any that we can't answer i'll be happy to tell you that uh chelsea will be your source of information for those so a little bit about the the background on the two of us um we are you had this role at bclt but before that we had had lives in the legal profession i spent most of my adult life as a patent trial lawyer with a stint in the upper parts of the united states patent trademark office and and i'll let ali give you a little bit about her background sure so i'm actually a berkeley law graduate many years ago service for me is coming home coming back to bclt after law school i clerked twice and i had a district court and an appellate court on the east coast and then i worked at two major law firms out in washington d.c where i came back from so to give you a little bit of a feel for bclt i'll start with why at least i showed up here and that was when i saw what bclt was really doing i wanted to be part of it it was actually something well beyond what people often a snarky way talk about the academic world it was blending 18 19 different professors and all their expertise together to actually match the business world and the tech world that's all around california it's got a heavy silicon valley focus but of course throughout california you've got so many tech companies that are driven by by berkeley lawyers that this was just a great way to be involved in what we learned very quickly is that the law isn't just patents or just isn't trademark or privacy if you're working with these tech companies you're working with all pieces of the law and you may not be the specialist in an area but often you'll be the person responsible for recognizing a problem and raising it up the chain so the great thing that we saw in bclt is all of these different pieces together to train lawyers to be really whole contributors to the modern tech world whether that is biotech ali's specialty my specialty high tech whether it's privacy or whether it's ethics in product development all of it is is really here in one place and that's something that makes berkeley different from every other law school out there when it focuses on tech a lot of other institutions focus on one piece at a time we try to focus on all of it together to make well-rounded well-rounded and contributing lawyers overall so what i wanted to do is share with you a few select pages out of our annual brochure chelsea will share the link for you for the whole book at the end of the meeting but i just want to show you a few things and maybe this will i guess maybe cause you to ask a few questions if you have any clarifications you want but i'll show you what this what this really means so let me switch over here okay you should be able to see my screen now ally can you confirm that you see it i do okay so what i want to start with is is overall kind of who we are so you know one thing i'm incredibly proud of that inherited a program that was 18 years in a row ranked as the number one ip program in the world uh that means there's a lot of pressure to make sure that there's a 19 and a 20 for for ali and me but a couple of other things you see here you know with faculty directors the scholarship of our individual faculty is tremendous three of the five most cited ip scholars in the world come from berkeley those are the same professors that will be teaching your courses a piece that i really like is the one right under it there are over 40 practitioner instructor instructors teaching these advanced courses and so what does that mean a practitioner instructor these are courses that are highly specialized being taught by the lawyers out of leading law firms that are seeing issues as they pop up so every year this material is as new as possible and you have these real specializations so you get the fundamental pieces from the existing faculty and then you get the opportunity to pick among these 40 plus real specialty type courses or 40 plus specialty instructors and that actually puts into about 50 courses to choose from over the next academic cycle out of that you see nine faculty authored textbooks when you think about that the people that you'll be learning from in the tech field are often those that are drafting the books that are used worldwide so when you you look at all that what does that mean uh that the thing that's i think most impressive is the 12 focus tech focus student groups so we bclt supports these student groups to really engage with the practitioner instructors with the legal or with the professors and these have real specialties that didn't translate into what the students want to do when they leave and it's a it's a big big variation in the type of student groups the great thing about it is there's a home for for anyone that's tech focused or tech interested in these different student groups the final piece that i that i'll put out there is that what bclt does and what the law school does doesn't stop with students one of the big things we do is try to take the scholarship the research the work and push it out into the industry so there's a long-term impact of everything that happens here so in the blue on the the bottom left-hand side you see the nine major conferences this is us working with practitioners on the right hand side you see i was working with federal judges and it's a key piece we work around the entire country on training federal judges with about ip issues and the types of things that they will they will see so one of the questions popped up that i want to want to take now because it was actually the next thing i wanted to discuss so you hear me saying tech you heard that i'm high tech ali is biotech but i had spent my life with most of my adult life with litigation teams doing very very sophisticated technologies and patent litigation half of my teams were always tech focused people engineering backgrounds the other half were not tech focused and you know the only requirement to be on the team is that you at least be curious and not afraid of the technology and i am i'm very adamant and actually i'm hostile to anybody that says you have to have a stem degree to participate in bclt or in patent law or any any of these tech areas you don't you just have to be curious and willing to learn the reality is if you look at my my undergrad degree it's almost 30 years old nothing that i learned in school is the least bit useful today but i'm not scared to learn from new experts so nearly every law firm out there will consider tech putting you in tech fields if you don't have a stem background and you see that in the privacy space you see the tech transaction space you see it in trade secret litigation there are all sorts of places and i think it's actually really important that tech the tech legal world not be dominated by pure engineers it needs a much broader perspective to make sure the tech industry is making the right legal and ethical decisions going forward so what are the the pieces you've heard me talk about the different pieces of bclt and i think this is the most uh telling way to describe what we do so we have six pillars that our research our academic academic work in our conferences are all organized around in our professors now a lot of professors tend to overlap but you see the classic ip and antitrust that's that would have been what every school would have started with 25 years ago and what a lot of places still have that's just that's where they started and ended berkeley built out this privacy cyber security and content regulation these are your classic privacy rules that you're seeing in california in europe and now in china we are the thought leaders on how to build that out and in fact one of uh berkeley's berkeley laws professors is leading the california privacy agency as one of its first co-directors it's important and this is where i'm adamant that you don't have to be a scientist or stem major to participate this technology disruption and social impact it's a key piece of what we look at what are the right ways to build things what are the right ways to interact with users uh we we see these questions coming up all the time now with with social media and first amendment issues so we're looking at more than just classic ip how are you actually supposed to be healthy and responsible with your product development the the next piece the data science and information technology it's a criminal a lot of a criminal law area about computer crimes so you start seeing lots of pieces there that really are a long ways away from ipn antitrust over here you're really into white collar type crimes entertainment new media this is classic uh the classic intersection between content creation like a netflix and the content delivery platforms you're trying to here understand how technology's impacting what's being delivered from classic entertainment all the way through to news and the first amendment issues that pop up with technology regulation and screening on news those types of things that you read the papers all the time now the final one this is ali's world it's brand new we added that this year to show the the future and where we're headed going forward and ali you want to describe what your vision is here sure so what we're really looking to create here and berkeley law sits in a really unique ecosystem with the startups that are working in the community and with really the changes that are going on we've all seen the effects of the research that has led to the kova 19 vaccine but that research has actually been going on for 30 years and so what we're really looking to build here from the student perspective is a really robust set of classes and experiences for students who are interested in life science who are in interested in health care and health technology some of that i think will end up overlapping with some of the work that we've already done in data science and information technology uh pharmaceutical policy ai and healthcare we're really looking forward to adding additional experiences that are focused in this space as well as supporting research that will be directed at these types of problems so with that background i'll pick up a couple questions here one somebody did their research and the question is how does the center for law and technology interact with the samuelson law technology and public policy clinic well the the easy answer to that is samuelson is professor pam samuelson she's one of the founders one of the the long-term drivers behind bclt so they are closely uh closely linked in terms of research and work uh the the clinic is you've got its own academic track and operates in many ways like a law firm uh with protecting its information and its clients so there are definitely separations in there but a lot of overlap in the the research and the work that's being done but the samuelson clinic is really taking it into the legal cases we don't get involved with particular court cases or particular clients so they're really the client focused side other question if students want to attend conferences are there funding opportunities to do so so the answer is is yes students often get involved directly in supporting conferences working at the conferences i think you also see that the student groups help put on their own conferences we support them but the students pick the topics we help we help find speakers for them if they need help so there's this nice collaboration between the two sides and in fact ali is driving one tomorrow tomorrow or thursday for uh race and health technology that was being put together by the the berkeley uh technology law journal so that's a it's more than just a tens the the students are very often at the heart of putting them together and crafting the the message that needs to be delivered not only to other students but also to practitioners out there the the last one i'll pick up here and then i'll address some others later that aren't students involved with the ip conferences that help train federal judges in those instances the students would are typically helping the professors that are putting the material together those are typically pretty detail-oriented um in-depth nuance type presentations that are often driven by 25-year lawyers talking about how the rules of civil procedure and how or interacts and how lawyers are really seeing the system work where clients are wasting money those types of things they are they're wonderful conferences to listen listen in on but students are often at the backside helping drive some of the research and putting together the material and i was one of those students when i was a law student here so i had the opportunity to get involved with that as a research assistant and that that collaboration has actually continued forward throughout my career based on the work that i did when i was a law student but it's a great opportunity to get involved in that so what i wanted to show you is just how these pillars break out and what you can you can expect to see in them so for the ip and antitrust show you the professors now you're going to see professors that work across a couple of these pillars and it's because some of their research projects end up touching multiple issues so one year they may be pure ip the other year they may be looking at ip and social issues so you'll see how their research plays out which is what makes them exciting to to work for but if you look at the types of courses typically you might see two or three of these courses being available to students but in this you see a tremendous number of courses so if you wanted to be an anti-trust lawyer you can focus on in-depth anti-trust but if you wanted to be a broad-based ip lawyer you can go through and pick all sorts of different classes right down to one of my favorites here if you look at this chinese ip law taught by one of the world's leading experts in chinese ip law well why does that matter it's because those laws are evolving every month and we're right on the front the front edge of helping interface between china and the u.s on these types of legal issues it's a lot of a lot of interesting classes here depending on where you think your your career will end up going long term uh ask about the conferences these are just a few of the types of conferences you would see and be able to be be involved in and out of this you know you can see the the variants and types of things google versus oracle is a copyright case related to software copyrights design patents if you don't know what a design patent is if you look at the bottom of your running shoes that's a typical design patent there or ceiling fans kind of ornamental designs but all the way over to this advanced life sciences ip institute that ali is in charge of that really helps drive thought leadership into the what is a very unique community on the west coast around life sciences give you some more feel the privacy cyber security this is a field that has really really boomed in the last few years in california and it's an interesting thing as california's privacy laws go the rest of the united states rules will go because our rules out here were really first in such a big market it really really set the standard for the entire united states and we've got all of these different different courses to help people understand this is it different than something classic like patent law that's mostly settled there's not a huge amount of change there's always change but not a huge amount of change versus privacy each changing probably every quarter right now so this is something that we really use the professors and practitioners to stay on top of because this is a field that's truly international you can't you can't just focus on the united states and survive as a privacy lawyer maybe of all the topics it is the most international of all and you were asking before about the the samuelson clinic you'll see katherine crump is one of our co-directors and she's the director of the samuelson clinic and then eric stallman is the associate director of the samuelson clinic so that tells you how closely engaged we are with the samuelson clinic events here also i'm not going to walk you through all the different events but to the place i wanted to take you to because it's not a place i think people intuitively go to when you think about tech law but berkeley law is always been a leader in dealing with the social issues that the law causes or regulations cause and it's no different on on the tech side and this is probably the most impressive list of courses you'll find anywhere in the country on how tech interfaces with society and all the way from social justice issues you'll see issues about regulated like this class regulated digital industries well that really matters for broadband access and the impacts of things like covid and homeschool had over the you know over the last year and a half so those are the types of things our professors have been in front of well before they became popular topics well before they showed up in the new york times just an incredible list of classes to show the diversity of thought in these types of tech focused issues it really comes down to at the end of the day tech is beginning to touch everything and if you're going to understand social impact you need to understand how technology is linked to to whatever regulation you're putting out there here we'll talk about it a little bit more in at the end but one of our newest professors he uh has a joint appointment at the school of public health is uh osagi obasogi so professor obasogi brings in and really unique and i think industry-leading thought on the ethics around innovation so for those of you that might have an engineering background you might recognize this you know when i when i went to engineering school the question was can you build it not should you build it no one asked that that next question that wasn't an engineer's question um osagie's work is focused on that other question should you build it what regulations need to be in place um if any and it's a it's an it's a wonderful thought-leading place to be and that's the kind of place where lawyers you see in silicon valley are really valued because between the federal regulations and state regulations and then just classic ethical issues that maybe aren't even at the regulation level yet lawyers out here being asked to help make decisions at the at a level that's not just law it's really about what should the future look like and that's that's the place we want to be as an institution and that's the place a lot of lawyers want to be is really making a difference going forward not just on an individual transaction but on the direction of an entire of an entire company so a little bit more of the the same here this focuses on uh more classic computer i t type technology you start seeing the interplay between for example copyright law and technology you see these fights in the music industry and how tech or how content is being licensed and moved around i think one here that i that i really like is at the bottom you see video game law and you don't think about that necessarily being an entire course but it's actually an entire specialty it involves labor issues it involves content issues it involves programming issues privacy issues there everything we've talked about so far is wrapped up in the video game law and i'll give you a perfect example there's an issue whether video game programmers are more like hollywood movie producers or are they more like software coders and it seems like a meaningless distinction but actually it really is incredibly important because it involves who's in the union who's not the union what benefits are required what job protections are there and those are the types of things that we'll be researching out here and that's those are the types of things that pop up in the class those are also the types of things that only really emerge because the law school is deeply ingrained with the tech community and sees how these issues are playing out in the real world so the last one i wanted to actually flip over to um is the life sciences and health technology you've listened to me enough and really to give ali a chance to talk about one what the curriculum currently has and two where berkeley will be beheaded in the next two to five years all right thanks wayne um so as you can see here berkeley already has a pretty robust set of seminars and courses that are directed to various features in the life science space so you know there's been a biotechnology class here for years there have been some public health offerings wine law is a personal favorite i took that class as a law student it's actually an administrative law class but there is wine drinking involved um but what we're really looking to do and part of what my work here will involve as we're getting the life sciences project off the ground is to really build this out to to increase the number of offerings in a variety of different areas i would like to see a lot more courses and a lot more focus on public health and on health care compliance health care law in that space i think that we have a a space to move in into where we're going to be able to draw from practitioners from the community as well as scholars to help with that i would also like to see more more courses offered for students who are interested in the fda and healthcare regulatory side i think that that's that's a an area that isn't often focused on at law schools but it's an incredible incredibly fruitful area for practice so you know i i i think that there will also be a number of collaborations with professor obi who wayne has already mentioned in terms of professor episode's work on bioethics are you going to talk about the law and technology writing workshop or should i say something about that go ahead absolutely you can do it now yep so there there's another course listed on here uh law and technology writing workshop which i think is really one of the jewels of our ip program so this is something i participated in as a student and it's continued on for it's been going for about 20 years at this point so it's an opportunity for 2l and 3l law students to write a published note to actually get a paper out in the in the ecosphere about a topic that is preeminent in basically in your interest area if you're interested in patent work you can be writing in that area i wrote mine on the interface of ipn antitrust in the biotech space copyright trademark trade secret privacy it's it's really running the gamut and i think it's a really transformative experience for the students who are involved in it in several different ways you get to dig really deeply into a topic you're going to be talking to other scholars you're going to be collaborating with your classmates to learn you know what everybody else is working on and you know how to give feedback and how to interact in those ways and then you're going to learn how to take your paper through the publication process and actually see it out in print which is a really cool thing to have happen as a law student not an experience that everybody gets to have and so i think i think it's a really important part of the offerings that we have here at berkeley so i want to take from here and i actually want to go back to this and this is the entertainment new media pillar but i want to show you the type of instructor you get from the outside because we're berkeley because we've had this reputation in the tech world outside individuals want to teach a specialty class and we get some of the the greatest minds out there and this is a perfect example um linda you can see i mean she's one of the 100 most powerful women in hollywood and one of variety's uh top 500 most powerful people in the media business and she's the one that would be teaching the talent contracting basically agent contracting type class at berkeley she's you know brings a level of expertise and on-the-ground experience that is very unique and that kind of that kind of advanced level instruction is what's important to get you from law school to wherever you want to in your career goals so there's a question here that i that i love to to what degree can one else get involved with bclt i think the the thought is that what somebody must be thinking here is that way okay this is great but i can only see this as a second or third year i won't be involved early on and the answer to that is absolutely not so when i moved to pdf this is a little blurrier than i would appreciate but all of these student organizations are supported by bclt ali and i meet with the leaders several times a semester to work with them about their programming about what speakers they want so the way you get involved with bclt is through these student groups and you get to pick the ones that work for you so you've got the berkeley technology law journal that's you know the number one tech journal in the country you get the entertainment and sports law journal both of those two journals come with annual conferences where you're inviting speakers in and actually the berkeley technology law journal has two annual conferences where the students are the inviting the speakers in often asking the questions moderating doing all the introductions you know they're driving the content for all the other groups some have have conferences others invite speakers in we have bclt supports a tuesday thursday lunch series the tuesday series is really something that ali and i put on pic speakers and you know drive content into that the thursday portion of the lunch series goes to these student groups and they can put up speakers they want topics they want so you kind of had this constant chance to not only interact with bclt but to interact with professors and with law firms and companies that you want to bring in and you want to hear from and the real benefit of ever planning a conference is that you can bring in the speakers you want to hear kind of customize learning for yourself and that's what these types of student groups offer offer you they also offer a lot of chance for leadership development opportunities to to work with other students other schools like the priv lab privacy law at berkeley to work with other schools within the university and that brings me to the final question i have posted here are there any cross-disciplinary collaborations or opportunities the way berkeley works is you have the opportunity to take classes in other schools and so the you can go to engineering school you can go to uh hospital business and those schools have the right to come and take certain certain classes within the law school so there is this this back and forth and one of the the early things i did when i joined bclt was work with the hospital of business and the engineering school to cross list several classes so they're definitely opportunities on that and there's a lot of framework for new opportunities that people want to create so this is kind of one of those things that is ready for molding and each student group that comes in or each student can really make an impact on what happens and how things go are developed a lot of a lot of flexibility in those types of things within the structures of a big university of course ali anything to add there i actually took multiple classes at the hospital i was a student here it is very flexible on the ground for you to be able to to have those crossover opportunities i think something else that people are often interested in or are particular entrepreneurship opportunities and so that's something that we've historically had and are exploring how to go forward and get jd students the opportunity to interact with startup founders in various spaces and with business students who are interested in this and so that's another one of the projects that i'm really looking forward to getting off the ground so i'm going to flip to the last piece of this rather quickly because it's long and it gets obnoxious but it does create a point and i want to show you this is not the law school faculty this is the bclt tech focused faculty and when you look at them all together you see how many we have it's an incredible range of topics if you look at andrea here you know professor roth was a public defender and she focuses on how technology is used in the criminal system and whether the rules of civil procedure are actually fair considering how technology has really changed the nature of criminal trials something that really wouldn't have been studied 20 years ago you kind of see this general i guess this big breadth of specifics i mentioned jennifer urban before she's the professor that now is the director or co-director of the california privacy commission so as california brought its new laws online they came to her to help really roll things out and make things go smoothly it's a great it's a great honor for her it's good for california and she'll be back within a short amount of time to to full-time teaching so it's a great great resource for everybody on that front and then our lectures this is just the list and you'll see this in the the link you're given so you can take a look at who comes to teach so just on this page if i pick brian israel the associate general counsel for international law at nasa i berkeley berkeley grad he teaches the space law class it's a it's a specialty class taught by nasa you can't find anything really more specialized than that or more interesting but when you go look through this list you'll notice everybody here is an award-winning practitioner in their particular area or an author of some particular book that practitioners rely on for their day-to-day practice i look at david here you know he wrote the book for the american bar association on it contracts the tech contracts handbook those are the kinds of people that kind of add that final level to your education to take it from the fundamentals to what you'd be doing day to day then this is the part that's obnoxious i had to put this list together it's actually incredible this is just the two years of scholarship from the bcit faculty all tech related all different all incredibly important heavily cited and relied upon but you can just see this list of publications goes on and on um that just shows you the type of impact that they these professors have but the same professors are the ones drafting the case books that you will be be learning from so it's a great you know it's a great mix of of of theory and of really practical information so that's who we are in in what's here i have to tell you i did not go to berkeley law so i come to this now as a giant supporter based on what i learned is i joined bclt there's a reason i left the federal government it was to be part of this organization so the enthusiasm you hear in my voice is not the enthusiasm of an alumni it's the enthusiasm of someone that's been deeply touched and impressed by the the professors and the foundation that was laid long before i ever showed up ally anything to add no i'll sort through any of the questions here i think my enthusiasm is from the perspective of an alumni and this is really where i learned how to think about the law and how to be a lawyer and how i wanted to go forward in my career and i think the breadth of the opportunities that bclt provides to students it's really remarkable and it's been influential for me in many different ways in my career and i'm honestly thrilled to get to come back here and give back so there's a question here about does bc bclt offer student opportunities to get more directly involved in programming and scholarship production beyond through relevant student organizations nearly everything is run through the student organizations you because they're so well established you've got the journals for example that's a it's a big a big issue behind the technology journal and the sports journal those are really established organizations they take the lead on the scholarship bclt takes the lead on supporting them but one thing we try to do is make sure that these types of opportunities are student driven put together by the students for the students and ali and i support our goal is never to take over and have the work done like we would want it done the goal is to support these student organizations to do the things they want to do so we we do really try to take a step back and make sure that we are enabling the student organizations to achieve their goals rather than taking over and doing it our way it's hard sometimes you know you want you want to help a little more than you should but we we try to always make sure we know that the students come first here's one does bclt offer support programs for first generation college graduates the um the answer is yes that was launched two years ago um we had some initial funding and had this year we worked with a lot of the major law firms in california and received meaningful grants to help make this scholarship a permanent part we don't have enough to endow it yet but we have enough to make meaningful scholarship offers year to year and i guess that i should add on that particular piece it's you know the question was does bclt offer it's really it's run through the berkeley technology law journal bclt backed by the sponsors the legal community locally that wants to be supportive of that so even in that kind of situation about supporting other students we try to make sure that students are involved in in this support process it's not about bclt taking over okay so um could you talk about how bclt engages with silicon valley companies and tech issues um are there unique opportunities law students would have as a result so two things when you say silicon valley that invokes high tech uh the first thing we're trying to do that you know that's what bclt's classically been ali is engaging with the the biotech community which really gets irritated when you refer to them with silicon valley most of them are set up in south san francisco in oakland so we're actually engaged with both of those communities and i have to remind myself to stop referring to everybody in silicon valley it does make the san francisco crowd pretty angry at times so how do we engage with them most of the big companies are sponsors of bclt we work with them on content some of them fund research we're very careful about how we take money for research purposes there's never any interference but for example we have major funding from qualcomm to do research on standard essential patents and the international flow of goods that's the kind of specific research but in addition to that we do a lot of a lot of programs that are designed to work with these communities are with these uh all the tech companies and i think ali this might be a good place to just introduce what we're doing for the next generation academy sure um so wayne and i have been working on an initiative that is focused a lot more at the level that you all will be at in a few years and we've been talking about it in terms of a next generation or a mid-level academy and so often times the the the folks who were in that that bucket you know between three and ten years out of law school or something in that group these are people who are starting to really learn how to do you know how to proceed forward as lawyers they're growing in their positions as you know in-house or at law firms um and what we're really looking to develop is programming that is directed at them that's going to be you know that it's going to provide them skills that they need for their jobs that's going to provide them up-to-date ethical information and that's going to help them grow in their careers and so what we're looking to develop is an actual in-person conference that's directed at the folks at this level to come in to network to meet their peers and to learn from each other and so we're looking at this for next fall is our target at this point and what have i forgotten away know and i think the reason this is so important is most of these most conferences end up being for more senior people and we're trying to really make sure that all the way through from student to mid-level up to senior we're providing support and providing community to for people to share ideas network uh look for their next career move those types of things it's a the great thing about being in the bay area is that so much of the tech world runs through here if you build your network if you make your connections all all the world opens up and i think that's a big piece of what bclt is trying to do all the way from first year law school through 10th year lawyer making sure that we support that that community the great thing is these all of the the tech institutions around here want to be involved and so we get speakers we get internships you know all the different things that are available just because of the density of tech companies in this area so that looks like all of the questions yeah i think we'll give it oh if there's one more um so the question is it's interesting um my impression from your presentation is that berkeley actively tries to approach the law from different perspectives uh which is incredibly inspiring how much input can students have in this exploration so the you know i i guess i view it as the course catalog is your input into that exploration professors are going to teach what they want to teach we're going to bring in outside people based on what we think is in the market what's going on in the in the legal world so we try to be incredibly relevant but try to be incredibly over inclusive we try to get all the different material there that matters and then out of that course list you'll be able to select the courses that help guide or i guess guide your career path by selecting those courses and one of the things i i've always encouraged people to do is so if you say you want to be a patent litigator don't spend your entire three years taking patent litigation classes you want to spend some time taking some other classes that are seemingly unrelated or tangential to really broaden perspective to help understand other pieces of the law because it may be that there's something that's much more exciting for you down the line and that's what that's how you guide your path and there's where your input is by picking the classes you really want to take some of them are core some of them are just things that look really interesting to you that you want to know about may turn out that that's the career path or it may turn out that that's the pivot within the law firm or within the corporation that you take i know lots of people that pivoted from doing patent litigation over to being privacy law experts maybe they when they started privacy law wasn't really a full you know a full job but then it became a full job and they became the world's leading expert on on privacy you know related to telecom uh for this individual that i'm thinking of but it was a career pivot and one class made the difference back in law school and to be fair at that point in time there was only one class for privacy it was a new kind of a newer concept so a lot of these things that were we're talking about are preparing for the future that no one can really predict yet but we're hoping that there's a foundational set of courses that will help everybody pivot to to the next piece of the law because the one thing i've learned after 25 plus years of practice is that the law is absolutely not static and the lawyers that succeed the most are the ones that can pivot in their career from one area to the next either to stay busy or just to stay mentally healthy and engaged and excited so the more choices you have in courses i think the better control you'll have over your future um so ali this one's for you what is the name of the initiative to support attorneys three to ten years out what have we decided are we calling it the next gen academy is that what we've gone with so yes i think i think that shows you how new this is to us we've been debating the title we've uh we've started looking for space it's kind of all coming together right now but i think it's the next gen academy yes stay tuned so question given the constant advancement of technology and the law surrounding it how do you prepare students for a career in this field uh decades from now the answer is you lay a foundation you learn to think like a lawyer you learn not to fear technology or change and then as the law changes you start going to conferences you read it's just a constant learning experience going forward um in in every piece of tech law and that's the exciting part about it and it's sometimes the scary part about it not exactly sure which way it's going but i know it's always moving and that's one of the things that bclt ends up doing is helping practicing lawyers pivot or advance their career maybe not even pivot maybe just move forward to keep up with how the law is changing okay i don't see any other questions great so um as i mentioned this is being recorded so i'll get this posted on the website hopefully in the next few days and i will follow up with any um with any of the attendees um so thank you all for attending this afternoon [Music] have a good rest of your day thank you thank you everyone much for coming

2021-11-19 15:06

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