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Strategies & Market Trends : Rande Is . . . HOME -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tradelite who wrote (30321)	7/24/2000 1:30:48 PM
From: Tradelite	Respond to of 57584

re: Intellectual property, Napster, anti-trust, etc. _________________ HEARSAY _____ By James V. Grimaldi Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, July 24, 2000; Page F31 With the arrival of the Clinton administration came a reinvigorated area of the law: antitrust. The conventional wisdom is that if Texas Gov. George W. Bush becomes president, antitrust is dead, dead, dead. Assuming the conventional wisdom is correct, what's a lawyer to do? Hearsay advises following the lawyer who always seems off to The Next Big Thing. David Boies of Boies, Schiller & Flexner has leapt aboard the intellectual property bandwagon and has gone to work for Napster, the Internet site accused of facilitating music piracy. The famous Microsoft Corp. prosecutor is not alone. Consider others who had various roles in the Microsoft antitrust trial and now are cultivating work in the hot area of IP, previously a backwater. Michael Lacovara of Sullivan & Cromwell is to start taking his California bar exam tomorrow as part of his move from the East Coast to Silicon Valley, and he already has been asked to provide IP litigation help to a number of Internet start-ups. Former Justice Department attorney Mark Popofsky recently joined Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler to rev up a D.C. practice that advises electronic-commerce sites on antitrust and IP. And Gail Cleary, a former New York assistant attorney general who put in yeoman's duty in the Microsoft case, has left the tutelage of antitrust guru Kevin Arquit at Clifford, Chance, Rogers & Wells for the IP practice. The work has her burning the midnight oil. "This is the smartest thing I ever did," Cleary said. "It is just a booming industry. They are just dying for people. They are just dying for bodies. Antitrust is going to be dead. This is the stuff that is going into the next century." It isn't just the technology area where IP business is skyrocketing. The Arlington-based American Intellectual Property Law Association (now there's an exciting group) has seen a 13 percent increase in membership in the past year to 10,600. The American Bar Association counts 25,398 individuals across the nation that fall into various intellectual property law categories, compared with 17,422 for antitrust. The on-fire IP lawyer market has caught the attention of the union that represents trademark attorneys, who are trying to use it to their advantage in contract talks. The union points out that in this fiscal year, 10 percent of trademark attorneys have departed, trading their GS-13, Step 1 salaries of $60,890 for $100,000-plus incomes of first-year associates at firms. Even Capitol Hill has caught onto the frenzy, with the Senate Judiciary Committee holding stick-waving hearings on Napster and the House Judiciary Committee convening a discussion on gene patenting. But the New Age technology has the Old Style politicians worried. "I'm a bit skittish," says Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the committee. "I'm still in the scary stage. I'm scared to death about where this is going. This is the scariest hearing I've had in the Judiciary Committee." Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.), the chairman of the committee's intellectual property panel, added, "I don't believe you hold the corner on the anxiety market. We all share that." The W