Plenty of lawyers available to staff boutiques, contrary to PatentHawk blog

In a post titled A New Kind of Patent Boutique? on 20 April 08 on the PatentHawk blog, Michael Martin wrote text which included:

When will our profession give up our pretentious game of arguing that law is so different from any other kind of professional practice? 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?

Of the sentence -- How many law firms would be able to tell the difference by the end of the summer? --, IPBiz states firmly that IPBiz would be able to tell the difference at the beginning of the summer AND at the end of the summer. IPBiz additionally states that any lawyer who can't tell the difference between a B-school student and a law school student, doesn't have an eye or an ear for law.

As an additional matter, IPBiz had a post titled Are MBAs competent to analyze patent law? which directed three inquiries to PatentHawk, the blog. Although Michael Martin did make a comment, he did not attempt an answer to any of the three inquiries. Relevant to the inquiries, IPBiz notes that Mike at Techdirt has an MBA from Cornell and has more familiarity with IP caselaw than any student will learn in a summer AND his commentary can be distinguished from that of any law student or IP lawyer. Thus, Mike Masnick is a counter-example to Michael Martin's conjecture.

A separate aspect of Michael Martin's piece is a commentary suggesting there have not been enough lawyers to handle legal jobs in recent years. There are many pieces of data that Michael Martin did not address. Merely fyi, IPBiz includes some employment rates, at graduation, for graduates of certain law schools, taken from Barron's Guide to Law Schools, 17th edition (2007)-->

University of Chicago (law school of Jon Dudas and LBE, among others): 99%

University of Akron: 60%

University of Alabama: 60%

University of Arizona: 65%

University of Arkansas: 48%

University of California, Hastings: 61%

University of California, Boalt: 83%

University of California, Davis, 75%

UCLA, 89%

University of Cincinnati, 63%

University of Florida, 66%

Florida State, 62%

Florida Coastal, 40%

University of Hawaii/Manoa, 60%

University of Illinois, 72%

University of Kansas, 60%

University of Kentucky, 63%

University of Miami, 64%

University of Missouri/Columbia: 57%

Seattle University: 36%

Saint Thomas University: 23%

Regent University: 51%

Pepperdine: 59%

Pennsylvania State: 61%

NIU: 49%

North Carolina Central: 49%

New England School of Law: 34%

Mercer University: 56%

Inter American University of Puerto Rico: 20%

IIT/Kent: 72%

Hamline: 45%

Gonzaga: 41%

Franklin Pierce: 60%

Duquesne: 60%

Cleveland State: 65%

CUNY: 28%

California Western: 49%

Boston College: 72%

Baylor: 65%

Ave Maria (Ann Arbor, MI): 38%

Appalachian: 41%

These numbers do NOT suggest that the economy is snapping up the lawyers that are out there.

ALSO

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/04/are-mbas-competent-to-analyze-patent.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/04/someone-arguing-too-few-lawyers-say-its.html

Comment at PatentHawk.com/blog:

A comment of sorts to Michael Martin/"PatentHawk the blog" may be found at

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/04/plenty-of-lawyers-available-to-staff.html

Whether "patenthawk.com/blog" passes branding 101, trademark 101, or Raffles v. Wichelhaus is a topic for the blogmaster. If you allow stuff on the blog with which you don't agree (? --> I was even polite enough to not comment on it), the ambiguity is yours. A related issue may be found in commentary on the ill-fated patent troll tracker about Niro. Was Frenkel responsible for the (tasteless) comments of others?
Opinions differ.

Individually, I would have trouble with ANYONE who thinks Gary Boone invented the integrated circuit doing ANY patent work for me. Is that platinum work, or fool's gold work? Again, opinions differ.

April 24

***Also, which "Michael Martin" are we dealing with?

Effects of Ion Irradiation on Microstructure and Mechanical Properties of Sputtered Cu/V Nanolayers. Engang Fu1, Jesse Carter2, Michael Martin2, Greg Swadener3, Amit Misra3, Nan Li1, Lin Shao2, Haiyan Wang4 and Xinghang Zhang1; 1Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas; 2Nuclear Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas; 3Mater. Sci. Tech. Div., Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico; 4Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas.

Michael F. Martin is a 2006 grad of Stanford Law and is listed on the attorney roster as a "patent agent." What is his science background?

***Update. April 25. The following was posted on patenthawk the blog -->

Concerning your words --I noticed you wouldn't stoop so low on your blog to mention other bloggers in the patent community. --, had PatentHawk (the person) bothered to check, he would have found PatentHawk (the blog) is explicitly cited in 53 posts on IPBiz (Patently-O 60 times).

IPBiz does not have a blogroll, but does mention other bloggers in the patent community. The two are different concepts. Blogrolls sound in the mutual backscratching of citation daisy-chaining in the science (and academic legal) communities: "I'll cite you if you cite me." Many patent blogs (NOT including patenthawk the blog) do not mention IPBiz, likely for that reason. As one specific story, shortly after IPBiz discussed the topic of citations to blogs, by law review articles, using Patently-O as an example (Patently-O being the most cited patent blog), IPBiz (listed as "Ebert") was removed from the Patently-O blogroll ("friends"). On the flipside, Patently-O lists
troll tracker TWICE as a friend, even though that link, for most mortals, is now useless. In the end, do you think your comment about "stoop so low" was a platinum concept? It might appear that patenthawk the person elevated form over substance, a base metal concept.

I don't understand your point about --Michael Martin does not work for me--. First, no one said he did. Second, are you implying that if he did, you would not post his material? Third, the issue is the posting on patenthawk the blog of material with which patenthawk the person (apparently) does not agree. Many news organizations post a spectrum of views, but they typically have disclaimers like "the views expressed ..." Otherwise, one has the maxim "silence implies consent." (Thomas More lost his head anyway.) I seem to remember that when Martin posted (the day after the "Gary Boone invented the integrated circuit" discussion) there were a few warnings in his post. In the end, it's your blog.

The text --Individually, I would have trouble with ANYONE who thinks Gary Boone invented the integrated circuit doing ANY patent work for me.-- was directed to how I do business, not how you do business. I generally find it useful to know "who" made an invention, "when" they made it, and "what" the consequences were, all of which were missing in Lemley's law review article "Patenting Nanotechnology."

***UPDATE
On the mutual backscratching of "blog rolling", as seen in the peer review business, note ezine:

Any researcher will tell you that lots of bad research is done that gets published. However, it's a publish or perish world. Since researchers and their peers are all caught in this same publish or perish demand, and review one another's work, they subtly collude to get as much research as they can funded and published. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. They argue among themselves in the journals as to the quality of their work, and for sure there is some competition among scientists as they solicit grants from the same sources to do pretty much the same thing. But there is overall an understanding that, as peers, united they stand and divided they fall.

Of course, this means that peer review is nothing more than a political arrangement for research workers, like a guild or union. It's goal is to keep control over their field, suppress the competition, and assure continued cash flow. It has nothing to do with science, the systematic search for truth, which must not be tainted by financial motives or tempted by personal gain.

Separately, some time in June 08, IPBiz appeared as a link on patently-o.