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The latest from the "lawyer-eat-lawyer" dept. from Medium.com:
Law Students Fend Off a Patent Troll.
Free legal support drastically changes a patent troll's calculus. They win by offering to settle cases for less than the cost of the legal defense. It's much cheaper for defendants to pay a troll $50,000 to settle a lawsuit than to pay lawyers $200,000 to win it. However, when a law school clinic is involved, the cost of legal defense drops to zero, and defendants have no incentive to pay trolls anything at all. With a free legal and a winning defense, who wouldn't fight all the way to trial? [...] Running a patent litigation defense clinic is not easy, but its possible, and its a worthwhile project. Patent trolls hurt innovation, and law students can help stop them.
This is a pleasant idea — the law students get practical experience; and the Patent troll gets to deal with a free defense against the claim. A real win for everyone.
Has anyone else seen a local law school pick up these kind of cases?
(Score: 2) by carguy on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:24PM
At MIT they have a very successful Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), matching undergrads with researchers (profs, etc, typically with PhD). The undergrads often produce useful/original research results.
Perhaps this would be a good model for a law school -- matching law students up as helpers for faculty (practicing lawyers) who guide the case?
(Score: 1) by Wootery on Thursday August 14 2014, @05:24PM
I doubt it. The point here as I understand it is that the law students were not really working as mere interns. What they got out of it was their own real-world legal success to put on their CV. If you start involving practicing lawyers, you've just got an internship in which you're asking practising lawyers to work pro bono. That's not really what this is about. In this case, the students managed it just about on their own. (That is at least the impression the article gives. The real difference between being an intern and doing work with the BLIP Clinic, I don't know.)