Welcome to the inaugural issue of IP @ the U, a periodic newsletter for students, alumni, faculty and friends of the University of Utah College of Law's Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law. If you have news about IP events, accomplishments and milestones, please send them to our Program Director, Jorge Contreras.

Congratulations to Jordan Cobabe, Trey Fanning, and Alexa Horn, who placed third in the semifinal round of the Rocky Mountain Regional portion of the National Patent Application Drafting Competition, organized by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The team both drafted a patent application and presented it at a mock examination hearing and was ably coached by Prof. Sam Tahmassebi.

At the Utah State Bar 2022 IP Summit, Professor Contreras had the honor of interviewing Judge Alan Albright of the Western District of Texas during a one-hour fireside chat. Judge Albright, who was confirmed in 2018, has recently made national headlines as the judge with the most active patent docket in the country. The conversation ranged across a number of topics including Judge Albright’s judicial philosophy, his case management style, and advice for advocates before him and students preparing to enter the practice of law.

At the Utah State Bar 2022 IP Summit, the Intellectual Property Section awarded its annual IP Scholarship Awards to three Utah students: Ellie Bradley (2L), Mary Grace Thurmon (2L) and Andres Cervantes-Morales (1L). Each award comes with a generous cash prize provided by the State Bar. Congratulations to our winners!

Professor Contreras’s recent book The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA (Algonquin, 2021) has gotten attention from the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, Nature, and numerous other outlets, and was recently recognized as the Best Patent Law Book of the Year by the popular UK-based IPKat blog. Prof. Contreras has spoken widely about the book on newscasts, podcasts and other media outlets including C-SPAN and NPR. In March, he was featured at the Virginia Festival of the Book in a conversation with Professor Cathy Hwang, our former Utah colleague who now teaches at the University of Virginia, in a discussion of the background, characters and implications of this important new work.

There have been a number of IP-related talks and programs at Utah Law this month. Visiting Professor Tabrez Ebrahim spoke at the faculty scholarship workshop about his new paper “Monitoring Corporate Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Risk.” Professor Ebrahim, who will be starting at Lewis & Clark Law School next year, has been visiting the University of Utah during Spring 2022 and is teaching Patent Law.

Prof. Contreras spoke at the college's Law and Biomedicine Colloquium about his forthcoming paper “In the Public Interest” - University Technology Transfer and the Nine Points Document – An Empirical Assessment, 13 U. Cal. Irvine L. Rev. (2023, forthcoming). The final colloquium talk was on March 29, featuring Jared Braithwaite and Alexis Juergens of Foley & Lardner speaking on "The Intersection of Government Health Regulation, IP, Trade, and Privacy Enforcement." The Law and Biomedicine Colloquium is hosted annually by Utah Law's Center for Law and Biomedical Sciences.

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Learn more about the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law's Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law on our website.