FROM THE EDITOR

By MICHELLE HOOGENDAM CASH Pemberton Legal Search

The Evolution of Lawyers

The conventional wisdom about pre-law college students is that they major in liberal arts such as English and government so that they can avoid taking math and science classes. They then go to law school, which, unlike graduate business school, does not have any math or computational requirements. This stereotype continues into practice, with the stereotypical lawyer who is technologically inept. Those of us who began practice before the ready availability of personal computers learned to practice law with a Dictaphone and legal pad. We actually used and read the books in the library to do our legal research. Westlaw and Lexis were available only on special terminals in the library, and we had to treat online research time like electronic gold because of its high cost. And, I used to walk to school uphill in the snow . . .  wait, I am getting off subject.

Today, of course, those assumptions and stereotypes are obsolete. As I draft this column on my laptop at my local coffeehouse, it is no wonder that the practice of intellectual property law and related litigation has grown exponentially. Moreover, the way that documents and data are created and stored requires that lawyers handling even the most straightforward litigation must understand technologies that were virtually nonexistent even a few years ago.

This evolution in the practice led HBA President Glenn Ballard to suggest a special issue focusing on IP and related litigation matters. We thus include the following articles in this issue:

• Electronic Discovery:  Dave Chaumette and Michael Terry have written an article describing the complexity of electronic discovery today, including a description of the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure relating to electronic documents.
  
• “Cybersquatters”:  Al Harrison and James Carmody have authored “Registration Roundup on the Internet—Trademark Surfing in Domain Name Space,” which gives a history of domain naming, describes the conflict between domain name registrants and owners of trademarks containing those domain names, and recommends approaches to addressing those conflicts.
  
• Patent “Trolls”:  Tom Casagrande discusses the Supreme Court’s recent eBay decision in “The Reach of eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C.:  Not Just for Trolls and Patents.”
  
• MP3 Players and Other Downloading Issues:  Carol Guess has discussed issues relating to the downloading and use of copyrighted materials in her article entitled “Downloading in a Post-Napster World: May Fair Use Be With You.”
  
• Inevitable Disclosure:  Finally, Greg Porter and Joe Beauchamp address the issue of confidential information possessed by employees in their article, “The Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine and its Effect on Employee Mobility.”
  

I would like to thank guest editors Al Harrison and Crystal Parker for all of their work in identifying topics and authors (and, in Al’s case, for co-authoring an article). A special thanks also to Albert Kimball, President of the Houston Intellectual Property Lawyers Association, who worked with our guest editors in identifying topics and authors for this special issue.

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