Patent Advocacy

• Semester: Fall 2024
• Course ID: 296V
• Credit Hours: 2
• Unique: 28655

Description

Meets at the Austin Federal Courthouse. This course has a professor-administered waitlist. To be added to the waitlist, please email: William_Atnipp@txwd.uscourts.gov

The objective of the class is to give students a hands-on experience of the major issues in patent cases from case filing and pre-trial. Students will take briefing from actual motions that were previously pending in Judge Albright’s Court. Students will prepare and argue both sides of the motions before Judge Albright as though they were arguing in court, learning over the course of several arguments how to zealously advocate for their clients while accurately recounting the facts and law. Other judges and special masters who handle certain motions and hearings will preside over some of the classes to expose the students to a wider variety of adjudicators. Additionally, in-house and outside counsel trial lawyers and experts will be available to the students to help coach them as they prepare for their hearings. To provide different experiences for the students in terms of venue, arguments will be made in the courtroom at the Austin federal courthouse. Accordingly, students should expect some non-standard meeting times. We will work with everyone in the class to ensure that any proposal to meet at an irregular time is acceptable to all students in the course.

Example motions in patent cases that students should prepare to undertake are:

1. Motion to dismiss
2. Motion to transfer
3. Claim construction briefing
4. Discovery motion 
5. Daubert motion
6. Motion for summary judgment