Accidental Blogger

A post today on Out of the Jungle, a legal information blog, has me thinking.  It refers to this  AP article in the Boston Globe (and elsewhere) regarding the growing numbers of students arriving  at law school after a detour through the sciences. Their obvious target is patent law, the practice of which requires prospective attorneys to take a supplemental bar exam to demonstrate their scientific competencies. The article features a former MIT doctoral student, Loretta Weathers, who tired of "the solitude of the lab" and sought a "sexier" career in technology law. So now she’s a patent attorney, but the article cites a copyright infringement case as an instance of how she has brought her scientific expertise to bear on the law.  Huh?

There are indeed copyright cases in which "experts" are called to
testify to the effect that an alleged infringing work B must have been
a copy of the purportedly infringed work A owing to its uncannily
"striking similarity" to A.  William Patry, a copyright expert who
recently published a multi-volume treatise on the vast topic, replete
with historical references to late-Renaissance Venice, often bemoans
the use of such experts, as he has recently here
on his blog. This post by Patry involves armies of experts, one who
sets out to prove one musician copied another’s work through Fast
Fourier Transform spectral analysis.  Whatever. In any case, that’s not
the sort of scientific expertise Ms. Weathers evidently wielded in the
case described in the Globe. That case, William A. Graham Co.
v. Haughey, required her to "put her science and math skills to work
behind the scenes, building a database of more than 1,000 acts of
alleged infringement." This is decidedly unsexy and not particularly
scientific work, I’m afraid. It looks more like ordinary document
review, the tedious poring over of files relegated to green associates
at big firms.

What’s more, the significance of the case as reported by the Globe
is its huge jury verdict. The verdict favored—are we surprised?—an
insurance company whose sales presentations were copied by a competitor
over fourteen years. This is getting less sexy, and I’m thinking I
might want to start reading up on Fast Fourier Transform spectral
analysis right about now for some excitement. The money to be made as
an attorney may not have been Ms. Weathers’ motivation, as she
confides, but the nineteen million bucks undoubtedly motivates the
story. On March 29, however, a court in the Eastern District of
Pennsylvania gave the insurance company a cold shower when it held that
the statute of limitations had expired for the most of the period of
alleged infringement. Therefore, most of the damages are barred. So
much for the rigors of database construction.

And so a curiosity of a story about the interplay of science, law,
professional education, and making a living, turns out to have
distorted or left out some important details. To some extent, the story
perpetuates the mythology of excessive jury verdicts, but it also
depicts a flatly unrealistic notion of the nature of legal work. I
imagine Ms. Weathers had much more to say of value about her former MIT
lab work and the comparatively stimulating life of an intellectual property lawyer,
but it either went unspoken or was edited from the final copy. Still, how is "building a database of more than 1,000 acts of alleged infringement" (of the  internal literature of an insurance company!) all that different from sitting "in front of a computer terminal going over graphs"? Ms. Weathers explains, "You do make quite a bit more money than you do as a researcher or scientist."