Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Patent Law Blogs -> IPBiz

Patent Law

: IPBiz

Are MBAs competent to analyze patent law?

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

In a post on April 20 titled A New Kind of Patent Boutique?, PatentHawk wrote about the possibility of business students (e.g., persons pursuing MBAs) analyzing patent law for law firms:

The benefits of cross-disciplinary work would more than outstrip the costs of less uniformity in our thinking about legal doctrine. I would love to try the experiment of teaching business students a single class on how to read case law and then sending them off to a firm as summer associates without telling the firm which students were business and which law school students. How many law firms would be able to tell the difference by the end of the summer?

Mike Masnick of TechDirt has an MBA from Cornell [The TechDirt website states: Mike has a bachelor's degree in Industrial and Labor Relations and an MBA -- both from Cornell University.] Indeed, the TechDirt website also states:

Techdirt?s core mission is to help people make better business decisions consistently, by getting the right information to the right people at the right time. We do this by combining the power of human experts, with the latest technologies, to turn raw data into valuable, relevant, accurate, reliable and (most importantly) useful information.

IPBiz invites PatentHawk to analyze the last four comments of Mike Masnick on IPBiz to determine

#1. If PatentHawk can tell the difference between Mike Masnick's analytical approach to answering a question and that of an average law student at an intellectual property firm.

#2. If PatentHawk thinks Mike Masnick's commentaries amount to valuable, relevant, accurate, reliable and (most importantly) useful information.

As a further point, IPBiz invites PatentHawk to investigate the impact of TechDirt on the legal literature of patents, as manifested, for example, in the LEXIS law review database.

***
See Mike Masnick, the "emperor" with no clothes

See Mike Masnick, unbundled

Full post as published by IPBiz on April 23, 2008 (boomark / email).