Edublawg

Prof. Steven Wilf, the faculty advisor in charge of the Connecticut Intellectual Property Notes (hereinafter IP Notes) - which I reported about in my last post – has kindly provided all Edublawg readers with additional information on the nature and purpose of the IP Notes, which I am summarizing below.

The Connecticut Intellectual Property Notes was conceived as a “seamless e-journal.” In particular, it was intended to cater for the situation in which a senior partner in a law firm has a novel or grey-area IP problem. Yet, since she has figured out how to cabin the problem without resolving the issue, she can no longer charge billable hours to a client (though she still wants to figure out the issue more fully). In this context, law students play the part of unpaid law firm associates who can be assigned to the task: the student provides a memo for the partner, and they both collaborate on a short article with shared attribution.
The fact that it is a firm partner choosing the topic ensures that other lawyers are probably facing similar issues, which accounts for the “seamless” nature of the publication: authors and audience are the same.

Additionally, articles appearing on the IP Notes are usually shorter in length than ordinary law review pieces. A more manageable size, along with the possible greater timeliness of published pieces (which should be enabled by the peculiar topic selection mechanism outlined above), both contribute to creating a resource with the potential of being immediately useful to the legal community and, in particular, to legal practitioners.

As for the educational and professional aspects, through the IP Notes, the law partner with years of legal writing experience does the editing and exercises quality control. Finally, the relationship which inevitably builds between law partner and student might also extend beyond the immediate writing of the article, thereby providing the student with valuable professional opportunities.

At this time, students do not receive credit for their work on the IP Notes. It has been a pure “labor of love”. However, since students have competing demands on their time, the IP Notes might eventually have to move to a system of granting credits in a way that more closely resembles a traditional law journal institutional structure. Nevertheless, Prof. Wilf’s aim is to create a board for the journal which includes both practicing lawyers and student members.

Finally, there are plans to initiate US student/non-US student collaborations. This, of course, will mean that topics will need to be chosen in a different fashion and that a different editing mechanism will have to be put in place. In fact, Prof. Wilf believes that US students, who are often less well exposed to comparative law issues than their European counterparts, would truly benefit from working with a student from abroad on international legal issues. In turn,  a European student (so far, only Europe & Israel have been thought of as possible collaboration venues) would sharpen his/her legal English writing skills.