The San Francisco Bay Area Intellectual Property American Inn of Court uses its focus on intellectual property issues to facilitate communication and exchange of ideas on those issues among attorneys with an intellectual property practice, and between the bench and the intellectual property bar. We also use our monthly meetings to provide training and mentoring opportunities for our more junior members, who participate in mock client counseling sessions, mock oral argument sessions and educational presentations on specific legal issues.
The 2007-08 term of the Inn included sessions on the changing law of willful patent infringement, an analysis of the proposed revisions to the Northern District Model Patent Jury Instructions, patent exhaustion, ethical considerations in fee agreements, copyright liability for websites that host user-generated content, the boundaries of patentable subject matter, alternative dispute resolution in IP cases, design patents, and ethical obligations of outside counsel in discovery. We expect that the 2008-09 term will feature a similar breadth of subject matter.
The Inn meets on the third Wednesday of the month, from September through November and January through June, with meeting locations divided among San Francisco, the Peninsula, and San Jose.
For more information about the Inn, please contact Joshua M. Masur, president, at inn@ipinnofcourt.org or 650 839 5040.