The Pierce IP advantage : Historical snapshot of 35 years of innovative IP education and programs
Introduction
Pierce Faculty are often asked by colleagues in academia and practice how it is that a small, independent, stand alone law school in New Hampshire can compete with institutions with major budgets and university resources such as the other top IP ranked law schools like: University of California—Berkeley, Stanford, George Washington. Columbia, Duke and others. One part of the answer is the unique history of innovative IP education at Pierce that has led to success of our graduates in all areas of endeavor in almost one hundred countries.
Almost the MIT School of Law
Thirty-five years ago Robert Rines, a patent attorney and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had a dream of the MIT School of Law where the focus would be on the interface of law and science as well as training patent lawyers with a practice based approach. What was intended as the “MIT North Campus” in New Hampshire was not to be, as a change of administration at MIT resulted in a decision not to pursue building a law school.
Rines was determined to see his dream come true and the Franklin Pierce Law Center was founded as an independent law school. In addition to being a second-generation patent lawyer, Rines was a wealthy inventor, holding nearly one hundred patents. His spirit of entrepreneurship has for over three decades driven Pierce Law to be an innovator in practice driven intellectual property education, always rated near the top of the list of laws schools with intellectual property (IP) programs as ranked by U.S. News and World Report.
Innovation begins : The first patent practice program in the United States
Rines had been a successful patent lawyer his entire career. What he experienced was that no new lawyers knew how to draft and prosecute patents. They knew some law but had no skills. Pierce Law was founded with the goal of graduating well educated IP lawyers who have solid practice based skills. Only two schools taught patent law in any meaningful way before the founding of Pierce Law and neither taught patent prosecution. This has been confirmed by Pierce Law after discussions with senior IP faculty at these law schools. The Patent Bar at that time was very small in number.
Rines collected a nationally unique team of patent lawyers that would present students with the most well rounded patent prosecution education. The IP Patent Faculty team at that time included a law firm patent lawyer, a university/corporate patent lawyer and a former patent examiner from the USPTO. This team set up the patent law and practice curriculum. The first courses were Patent Law and Practice I & II, which remain the backbone patent prosecution courses to this day.
Innovation continues: The first to train global intellectual property professionals
From the founding of the school it was the vision of Rines that Pierce Law would be a Global Center that included a law school and other programs and activities to promote global IP as an engine of innovation, growth and public interest. From the day Pierce Law opened its doors it has trained professional on the spectrum of countries from developed to developing. Professionals were invited to come to Pierce Law and partake at no cost of our courses and Faculty. Pierce trained these professionals and facilitated their travel to major institutions of IP activity.
A decade after Pierce was founded these activities were organized into the first interdisciplinary IP degree in the nation, the Master of Intellectual Property Program (M.I.P.). This one year program was designed to train IP professionals from around the globe. This non-law degree was awarded to foreign lawyers and non-lawyers who left Pierce Law and spread around the globe to form some of the original national government IP offices, law practices and NGOs. Pierce is proud that in the history of the school we have trained IP professionals to nearly one hundred countries.
Pierce Law IP Faculty activities were not confined to the U.S.. Since the inception of the school, Pierce professors have traveled the world teaching and presenting in dozens of countries in setting ranging from formal educational affiliations, professional associations and NGOs. Pierce Law has long been known as having professors who "educate the educators."
More innovation: The first to expand the teaching of IP from patent law to over fifty course offerings
When Pierce Law began, IP law as taught by law school was limited to patent law. Since the Pierce team included a university/corporate IP counsel as well as a professor with an LLM Degree, (Trade Regulation) from New York University, the core patent curriculum steadily grew to include the full range of what is known as the modern practice area of IP that includes patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, unfair competition as well as practice areas that have an interrelationship with IP. Pierce Law attempts to point out in non-IP dedicated courses the IP implications of a wide range of subject areas. The following is not a list of course, but of areas of law with IP applications. Looking at IP in many courses is a concept Pierce Law has termed "IP through and through", meaning our students learn IP throughout their law studies.
- Agriculture law
- Art Law
- Bankruptcy
- Conflicts of Law
- Commerce & Technology
- Crimes
- Damages
- Economics
- Employment (e.g.trade secrets)
- Entertainment
- Environment (e.g. sustainable development)
- Health
- Human rights (indigenous, cultural, traditional)
- Insurance
- Labor
- Remedies
- Sales (Uniform Commercial Code)
- Secured transactions (debtor/creditor)
- Sports
- Taxation
- Torts (defamation, appropriation)
Pierce Law: First to constantly add new courses to meet global needs
For over thirty five years Pierce Law has constantly evaluated its IP curriculum each year, adding and dropping courses to meet he needs of soon to be lawyers and global IP professionals.
The hallmarks of the Pierce Law IP curriculum:
- Broad and deep, with dozens of growing and changing courses
- Integrates all aspects of IP and then integrates IP throughout the general curriculum
- Recognizes the global nature of IP and offers many foreign, international, comparative and global courses
- Recognizes the value of a practice based education as part of an integrated strong legal education
- Recognizes the interdisciplinary nature of IP and includes courses at the interface of IP, business, management, science, technology, economics, public interest and more
- Recognizes the ever changing nature of IP, offering courses in IP in developing nations, such as Traditional Knowledge
- Recognizes the value of scholarship offering many opportunities for IP students to engage in scholarly courses resulting in publishable quality work products.
Pierce Law leads the way with the first IP management courses: The IP life cycle management approach
Since the "founding fathers" of IP at Pierce Law included patent law firm lawyers, corporate counsel and university counsel from MIT, Pierce was the first to offer courses on IP management. These courses were initially taught by Professors Robert Rines and Robert Shaw. The IP management curriculum grew with the addition of Professors Homer Blair and Karl Jorda. These law courses offer students the opportunity to master the IP Life Cycle:
- Identifying IP and intellectual capital
- Creating IP
- Branding IP
- Protecting IP
- Managing IP
- Valuing IP
- Creating new markets for IP
- Monetizing IP
- Transferring IP
- Financing IP
- Securitizing IP
- Taxation of IP
Before the ABA and ivy league law schools: Innovative IP clinics serving live clients
Since Pierce Law was founded it has continuously offered IP clinics where students work with IP professor attorneys. These clinics have served a wide range of clients over the past thirty five years, including universities, corporations, scientists and other small inventors of many types. These clinics have consistently offered services ranging from patent searching and prosecution to a full menu of other IP protection and business integration.
These clinics operated long before the legal profession and educators put any value on practical skills training. That changed when the McCrate Report was issued in l992, which conceptualized law training as an educational continuum involving specific responsibilities on the part of both law schools and the practicing profession. The McCrate Report identified ten basic lawyer skills and four fundamental values it recommended legal education should be primarily responsible for teaching, leaving it to mentors in the bar to hone these skills and reinforce these values during the early years of practice. Ivy League schools such as Harvard Law began to offer clinical education several decades after Pierce Law had set the example for legal education.
Pierce Law continues to innovate offering more IP clinics than any other IP law school currently covering:
- Patent searching
- Patent claims interpretation
- Patent landscape analysis reports
- IP amicus briefs and position papers
- International technology transfer studies
- Building international technology transfer offices (TTO) and increasing TTO capacity
- Trademark and copyright searching and prosecution for businesses and artists
